Halfway Point, 9-1 Victory

Vassar got back on track yesterday with a 9-1 victory over Green Mountain College, the most goals we’ve put past a team in my four years here. We knew that Green Mountain (coming in at 0-13 with 8 goals scored and 78 allowed) would not be the toughest team on our schedule, but we still needed to make sure that we came out focused at the start and put the game away early. Two goals each from our starting strikers Jon Hootnick and Ben Scaglione gave us a 4-0 lead and when we added five goals in a five minute stretch from the 31st- 35th minutes we were able to ride out a comfortable victory, despite Green Mountain pulling a goal back with a good long-range shot in the second half.

The victory puts us at 4-4 as we hit the halfway point of our season. While we’ve been able to put away teams like Green Mountain with a barrage of goals, we haven’t been able to translate this into goals against tougher opposition, as we have scored only once against our four toughest opponents this year. Our goal differential of +15 despite a .500 record reflects our inability to prevail in close games. We’ll face Bard on Tuesday before resuming our Liberty League campaign next weekend. While it was good to get some confidence on the offensive end this weekend, we need to translate that into goals against tough opposition next weekend in order to stay in the playoff race.