Jefferson’s Junior Varsity (JV) girls soccer team lost at home to Justice on April 18 with a score of 0-5, marking their eighth loss of the season.
“It has been a struggle; the majority of the freshmen last year did not come back. Starting with the new team, we’re trying to figure out how to play together,” sophomore captain Izzy Meyers said.
With this loss, Jefferson is now prepared moving on to their next game.
“Even with this loss, I think we’re all still excited to play. If we keep showing up to practice, I know we can do it,” freshman Ashley Valdez said.
They also hope they can use this as motivation for the rest of the season.
“Justice taught us a lot [about] where we needed to improve defensively along with the wingers. [The game] taught us how to attack the ball in a way that makes it so they won’t get around super quickly,” Meyers said.
The game had started rough for Jefferson with Justice scoring the first goal of the game after a penalty for Justice. Jefferson had struggled early on with little success on defense and offense.
“This year we have really struggled to start games on both sides of the ball so often our strategies for the game don’t end up working until later in the game,” Meyers said.
With Justice’s goal, they started to take control of the game with four more goals before leading into the half.
“This game made us realize that we need to improve a lot defensively although some of our struggle was also due to injury,” Meyers said.
Although Justice had taken a commanding lead, the Jefferson team had kept pushing on.
“During warmups we’re often just walking, but it leads to a rough start, and that’s why generally our second halves our much better,” freshman Hannah Golden said.
During halftime, the team had discussed what they could do to improve in the second half.
“Our halftime really helps our team as it gives us time to get water and have pep talk about what we notice so we can do better for the rest of the game,” Meyers said.
In the second half the team had picked up the pace as both teams started going back and forth between offense and defense.
“After halftime our team and strategy started working better, and Justice was using similar strategies all game which helped us stop them,” Meyers said.
Jefferson’s defense now found rhythm and prevented multiple attempts by Justice to score. Even with the 5-goal deficit, Jefferson girls stayed persistent the whole game. Freshman Hannah Golden kept Justice on their toes by dribbling across the whole field multiple times alone.
“I can’t expect my team to be up the field, but it could be helpful to work on offensive tactics during practice,” Golden said.
The team knows what they need to improve and they’re already making changes.
“We have to fix both the offense and defense on the team. Hopefully next year we’ll stop messing around so much to eventually win a game,” Valdez said.