Riley Dunbar of Evergreen weaves his way through the Otsego defense during Tuesday’s boys soccer match at Pifer Field. He had a goal in the Vikings’ 5-0 win over the Knights.
Max Householder | AIM Media Midwest
Evergreen’s Alex Peets gets to a ball versus Otsego on Tuesday. Peete registered a goal and an assist in the Viking win.
Max Householder | AIM Media Midwest
Sometimes the words are undescribable, and what happened in the first half in the Evergreen-Otsego boys soccer match Viking coach Dave Skoczyn called it a “thing.”
Open shots hit posts, bumps on great passes went wide, and then more shots went directly at the keeper.
However, all what was seemingly wrong in the first half, was righted in the second as the Vikes poured home five goals in a 20 minute span for a 5-0 shutout of the Knights Tuesday at Pifer Field.
The victory pushed the Vikings to 5-2 on the year.
“I guess I outcoached myself because our guys didn’t want to play with the wind and did pretty well against the wind,” Skoczyn joked after. “Because we didn’t score I think it became a ‘thing,’ and once it became a ‘thing’ everybody made it a ‘thing’ and then we couldn’t do anything.
“It was definitely a tale of two halves and we switched the formation a bit in the second half because of the wind.”
The first half was a nightmare of missed chances.
Tyson Woodring split the defense and rifled a shot that had goalie Scott Koch beaten but rang it off the left post 10 minutes in.
Brodie Setmire had two more chances in the next 10 minutes but Koch saved the first and the second sailed past the left post.
Konnor Sanford had a shot to score with 14 minutes left on the clock from in front but Koch again made the save.
In the second half though against a strong wind, Evergreen got going.
Woodring’s throw in from the right side was headed in by Alex Peete at the 31:13 mark to put the Vikes on the board.
Less than a minute later, it was Peete again feeding Riley Dunbar who went right-left-right past a defender for the score.
Wil Parquet got into the scoring column three minutes later when he knocked in a corner kick from Woodring for a 3-0 lead.
“We are a tough team with set pieces,” explained Skoczyn. “We work on it all the time, we scored a bunch of goals on set pieces last year and we’ll keep doing it until we need to change it again.”
The Vikes weren’t done as Alex Fritsch worked the give-and-go to Woodring for a score with 17:10 left, then Darius Lojewski finished scoring with a header off another Woodring corner with 10 minutes to go in the contest.
“We’ll keep putting guys in the box and keep making things happen,” said Skoczyn. “Wil had a good goal and so did Darius, and it’s all about the service and Tyson did a great job with that today.”
Evergreen peppered the Otsego defense with 37 shots, Koch saving 16 of those.
Otsego only got off nine for the game with Jon Burnep saving three in the shutout.
Evergreen hosts Northwood Thursday night at 7:30.
