Sports
A young McMath Wildcats placed seventh at the B.C. high school girls AAA soccer championships last weekend in Burnaby.
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McMath looks to promising future
Paul Pedersen is already looking forward to
next season when the McMath Wildcats are expected to be a force on the high
school soccer pitch.
“We need to find a keeper, but attacking-wise
there won’t be many teams better than us,” said the coach of the McMath girls
AAA team that, with only a single Grade 12 player in captain Georgia Booker,
competed well to finish seventh at last weekend’s provincial championships in
Burnaby.
“I’m very proud of the girls, they battled
hard,” said Pedersen. “We were a little flat on day one and it cost us. But we
finished the year with 14 wins, three draws and two losses and had 73 goals for
and only eight against. That is a pretty good year in my eyes. You always want
to win provincials, but going into the season with so much turnover from last
year, realistically it was a long shot.”
Next season, the Wildcats will lean heavily
on a core of players who will then be seniors including Dakota Chan, Lauren
Dickson, Kirsten Wilshire, Emilie Sherritt and Jalen Donaldson. Grade 9s
Maddison Elcombe and Kayla Nimchuk both had huge impacts this season and will
need to take another step in their soccer development next season “to help the
squad jump into the medal round,” said Pedersen.
Fighting the jitters, the Wildcats played to
a 1-1 draw versus Burnaby North Vikings in their opening match at the 2017
provincials before concluding day one in what Pedersen said was perhaps their
toughest match of the season against Centennial Centaurs. Loaded with talented
Grade 12s, the Centaurs posted a 1-0 victory.
McMath kicked off the second day by
outscoring Clayton Heights 1-0. The winning goal came with 20 minutes to go on
a through ball to Wilshire from Nimchuk. But the joy was short-lived as they
lost 3-1 in a shootout to a physical Kelowna Owls side.
“We had a chance to win it in the last three
minutes when (Lauren) Dickson hit a half volley into the top corner of the net,
only to see the Kelowna keeper make a world- class, one-handed save and tip it
around the post,” said Pedersen. “To be fair, I have never seen a high school
keeper make a save of this quality.”
The result put McMath into the seventh-place
game Friday against the North Shore champion Handsworth Royals. McMath possessed the ball much of the
game and created multiple chances. With about 15 minutes to go, Chan made a
solo run down the right flank beating three defenders to cut the ball back to
Allison Fast waiting on the penalty spot. She finished it neatly with her left
foot into the far corner. Though tired, the girls battled through to limit the
Royals to shots from distance.
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