The games began Saturday night as the women’s soccer team kicked around a ball and fought to find the back of the net until the final whistle blew.
The Dixie State University women’s soccer team took a 3-0 win against Salt Lake Community College Saturday night and kept the momentum the entire first half of the scrimmage when they held SLCC to zero attempts at goal.
“We feel like we have a pretty quick team,” head coach Kacey Bingham said. “We’ve worked a lot on fitness so we can make sure we’re able to make the runs and challenge the ball.”
DSU failed to score in the first half, and the team decided it didn’t like that result. The Red Storm then got determined and ran away with the win in the second half.
Forward Jennifer Mason, a junior accounting major from Springville, took advantage of the momentum when she found the back of the net 15 minutes into the second half.
“We started actually taking shots,” Mason said. “We were being timid in the first half, and nobody wanted to take the shots.”
Bingham said the women were thinking of their teammates instead of themselves, and that’s something that can result in a loss.
“No one wanted to pull the trigger,” Bingham said. “No one wanted to shoot in the first half. Everyone was passing off to their teammates, which is good, but at times we’re not going to score goals if we don’t take shots.”
The Red Storm scored their three goals in the second half.
“The first half, we definitely thought things weren’t where they should be, and we addressed it at halftime,” Bingham said. “The second half, we were super pleased at how they came out, how they performed, and what they brought to the table.”
The team kept the momentum throughout the game and had 21 shots at goal compared to SLCC’s three attempts.
Defender Emily Fox, a junior elementary education major from Lehi, said the Red Storm made goals prior to the game, and having that goal in mind helped finalize the win.
“We just have to pump ourselves up,” Fox said. “Having the goals and working together as a team helps us keep that momentum.”
Dixie State is ranked No. 7 out of the 13 teams in the Pacific West conference pre-season poll, and Bingham said that’s not where the team wants to be.
“It’s just another goal to challenge us and push ourselves to where we want to be, which is hopefully in the top two,” Bingham said.
Bingham said the scrimmages help the team learn and grow to get ready for the regular season.
“Scrimmages are crucial because they let us know where we’re at,” Bingham said. “It’s a marking point… and we really need to know where our struggles are.”
Fox said SLCC couldn’t overcome the Storm’s momentum, so the defense had little time to prove what it could do.
“We did really well with this game, but they didn’t give us a whole lot of opportunities to show ourselves what we could do in the back,” Fox said.
Mason said the scrimmages also help the team focus on a specific style of soccer, and once it grabs a hold of it, the team will be ready for the season.
“We want to work on our formation more and just get it down because we have a very specific formation that we like to play,” Mason said. “Once we actually get it down, we’ll do really good. We played really well with it; we just need to practice it a little more.”
DSU faces California State University-San Bernardino on Thursday at 1 p.m. in San Bernardino, Calif., and the team hopes to pick up there where it left off in the second half of the SLCC scrimmage.
“We talk about not going backwards, and once we reach new heights, (we need) to build on that and then keep building higher,” Bingham said.
