Drury Tops Pittsfield for First Win
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. – It was a sweet Monday for Drury sophomore Addisyn Shepard … and not because of the birthday cupcakes she shared with her teammates after their soccer game.
Shepard stopped 15 shots to backstop the Blue Devils to their first win of the season, a 2-1 victory over Pittsfield on John J. DelNegro Field.
Megan McGrath scored a pair of goals as Drury avenged a 4-2 loss to the Generals in the first week of the season.
“It feels good,” Shepard said. “Everyone worked together, and it was a good game overall. It feels good to win, finally.”
McGrath scored a goal in each half.
She started the game in the 13th minute by putting the finishing touch on a cross inside the 18 from Tenley Wood.
Then, five minutes into the second half, McGrath took a pass back from Ella Bond about 38 yards from the goal and ripped a shot that bounced in front of PHS keeper Harolyn Castillo.
Castillo played the bounce cleanly, but the official ruled that the ball crossed the goalline before she got her hands on it.
“I’ve been working pretty hard to go outside, so I can help back on defense and push up and score on those opportunities,” said McGrath, who leads Drury with six goals this fall. “And our team does really well feeding me the ball out here, so we can get those opportunities.
“We work really well to work to everybody’s strengths.”
Pittsfield tested Drury’s backfield most of the afternoon, outshooting the Blue Devils by a margin of 18-4.
Despite carrying the play most of the afternoon, though, the Generals had nothing to show for it on the scoreboard until the 69th minute.
“The bottom line is we didn’t do what we needed to do today,” Pittsfield coach Molly West said. “I thought our pressure in the first half was lackadaisical.
“We work a lot on getting the ball to the corner flags, and we continued to pound it down the middle today from our defensive end. … Still making mistakes that we can’t afford to make – offensive players being on the wrong side of the defender, pounding the ball down the middle, things that we work on all the time.”
The Generals did create some dangerous chances in the first half after giving up the opening goal.
Six minutes later, Caprese Conyers took a through ball up the middle from Amelia Weibright and fired a shot that went just wide of the goal. In the 33rd minute, Madi Pope made a run up the left wing and took a shot in close that Shepard saved. And with just more than three minutes left in the half, Shepard came well off her line to beat Conyers to a ball at the top of the 18 and kick it out of danger.
“For somebody who’s never played goalie, never had goalie training to step up and be my keeper two years in a row and keep up in, pretty much [26 games], she’s great,” Drury coach Syid Ugdah said. “If she keeps training and sticks with it, she can go places as a keeper if she wants.
“Our defense, they hunkered down. They made the decision that nothing’s getting past them. That’s what they did. They stepped up … everybody talked to each other. It was a complete game, start to finish.”
The one blemish came in the 69th minute, when Pittsfield’s Nora Hammill took a direct free kick from the right wing in the final third. Her entry glanced off the head of a Drury defender and directly to Abbey Wong, who one-timed a shot into the net to make it 2-1.
The Blue Devils were able to tighten up their defense in the final minutes to withstand Pittsfield’s efforts to build on that momentum.
“This win really helps us out as a team and helps us look forward to what we can do and how we can play,” McGrath said. “Especially beating a team that beat us early on, 4-2, it feels really good and shows everything we can do as a team when we work together.”
Drury (1-5-1) hosts Pioneer Valley Regional on Wednesday.
Pittsfield (4-2-1) hosts Frontier on Friday.