Mount Greylock Takes League Title on Senior Night
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. – The Mount Greylock girls soccer team Wednesday made its coach look pretty smart.
And while Blair Dils does know more about soccer than the average bear, this time, he said, looks were deceiving.
“The reason I called timeout was because Adele [Low] needed her ankle taped, and I wanted to just give a little bit more time for [assistant coach] Mike Russo to tape her ankle,” Dils said after a 4-0 win over Wahconah.
“I know it seems like I said something brilliant, but I did not say something brilliant, that’s for sure.”
Coincidence or not, the Mounties scored two goals in the 2 minutes, 32 seconds following that timeout to take a 2-0 lead and never looked back in earning a season-sweep of Wahconah, a Grieve Division Championship and a 12-0-1 record with two games left in the regular season.
While Dils did not claim to have imparted any particular words of wisdom during his first-half timeout, there are some things he and Russo have been working on with the squad that bore fruit in Wednesday’s Senior Night win.
“All week we talked about just playing to feet and really moving the ball quickly so it didn’t get into the kind of physical game Wahconah likes to play,” Dils said. “And we were pretty opportunistic in our chances the first part of the game.”
The first goal came when Nora Lopez played the ball from the right wing to Tanley Drake inside the 18 and then cut to the middle. Wahconah keeper Paetyn Tatro (11 saves) stopped Drake’s shot, but the rebound went to Lopez at the top of the penalty area, and she directed the ball toward the goal.
Tatro, scrambling back to the other side of the net, got a hand on it but could not keep it from finding the back of the net to make it 1-0 with 27 minutes, 48 seconds left in the half.
At the 26:03 mark, Drake scored to put the Mounties up by a pair of goals.
“When you get two like that, that can be demoralizing for the other team,” Dils said. “But [Wahconah] responded really well. We did not get in a rhythm at all the last part of that half, and the old cliche about the most dangerous lead [being a two-goal lead] was certainly creeping into people’s minds and was mentioned at half-time.”
In fact, Wahconah held its own in shots on goal over the first 40 minutes, only allowing the Mounties a 6-5 edge in that department.
One of the visitors’ best chances came in the 28th minute, when Brooke Harrington brought the ball up the left wing on a counter after a Mount Greylock corner kick, dribbled around a couple of defenders just outside the 18 and hit a left-footed shot that forced the Mounties’ Noemi Evans (seven saves) to make a leaping stop.
But after playing nearly even – except on the scoreboard – in the first half, Wahconah was not able to generate much in the way of pressure after the break and quickly found itself down by three goals when Drake converted a cross from Lauren Powell in the 46th minute.
“We lost momentum,” Wahconah coach Maggie Rivers said. “We tried some new things today, and they didn’t really work out.”
With fewer than five minutes left to play, Mount Greylock capped the scoring when, on a corner kick play, a Wahconah attempt to clear the ball off the end line was deflected into the goal by Mount Greylock’s GG Nicastro.
Wahconah (10-3-1) will try to snap a two-game skid on Friday when it travels to Frontier.
Mount Greylock has two games left in its regular season before moving on to the Western Massachusetts Class C Tournament, where it currently is seeded first.
“Longmeadow, No. 4 in D2 [on the road on Thursday] and then Northampton Monday night,” Dils said. “Real good, big tests, and we’re going to have to learn to play, maybe, more of a defensive scheme over the next couple games. Let’s see if we can counter attack out of that.”