Girls soccer: Shawnee tops Bath

The Indians took care of their cross-town Western Buckeye League rivals Tuesday night on their home pitch to get a 3-0 win over the Bath Wildkittens. The Shawnee Indians scored three goals in just four shots from junior forwards Kamryn Morris and Tayma Jmiai.

In the first half, Bath pressed hard getting close to the goal more than a few times, shown by their seven shots taken on the night, but Indian goalkeeper Chloe Nance was on it stopping everything that came her way.

However, towards the end of the first half, Shawnee turned up the pressure with multiple corners and back-to-back shots on goal, including a header that hit the crossbar at the 28-minute mark.

In the 30th minute, the Indians struck first with a goal from Kamryn Morris after two previous blocked attempts, Morris got the ball from senior midfielder Riley Smith and go on to hit the back of the net to make the game 1-0 Shawnee.

Shawnee displayed an excellent defensive effort in the first half as well to keep Bath scoreless, as the score remained 1-0 at the half. The defensive effort increased going into the second half.

In the second half, Shawnee came out in a groove on offense making its way down field on a consistent basis. That led to another Kamryn Morris goal six minutes into the second half at the 46th minute mark. Morris knocked in the header from the corner kick assisted by sophomore defender Addison Neth to make it 2-0 home team.

Coming out of the half, head coach Caroline O’Brien told her team in the “first five minutes, really high pressure, let’s try to get a second one in” which Coach said gives things “a little bit of calm, so there’s not as much pressure going in.”

Shawnee continued to put the pressure on as Tayma Jmiai got the ball from junior midfielder Cameron Ridenour and scored Shawnee’s third goal of the night in the 63rd minute with a strike in the box to the top right corner of the net. Shawnee led 3-0 and go on to win by that same score.

After the game, Morris spoke about how her team played. “It was a good win. We’ve been doing really good offensively lately, but we just finally put the pieces together and finished goals.” Morris also knew what it’s going to take if they want to win the WBL. “We’re going to need to win every game, keep finishing, keep working hard, just work as a team, play together … working together and communicating well and taking a lot to get saves. Bath played really hard; it was a tough win. My team played well, and I’m proud of them.”

Coach O’Brien was happy with her girls’ performance against a young Bath team. “I was really proud of them tonight because obviously you can see that the three ties in the first three games of the season, we’ve been struggling to find the back of the net, so it was a good feeling not only to get the shutout, but to also get three goals against a quality team like Bath. They’re very young, very fast, very aggressive. We were trying to force Karlie Wallace, trying to prevent her left foot, because she has a dominating left foot, force everything to her right and then Faith Clark did a wonderful job in the midfield for them and trying to double her in the second half to try and create some turnovers, so we just try to put a little bit of extra pressure in there on some key players, to get some turnovers, to get transitions, and get into the attacking third. I think this is great for them, so far as beating a nice quality WBL team like Bath. We’ve always had really close battles with them in the past, so it’s good to get that win under our belts and to have the kids finishing tonight and excited about finishing and scoring those goals, I think it was a great confidence booster and from here on out, it just gets tougher, so we got to keep going.”

The Indians improved to a 1-0-1 record in the WBL and 2-1-3 overall while Bath felll to 1-1 in the conference with a 2-3-0 record overall.

Justin Dierkes wrote this story for LimaScores.com. Reach The Lima News sports department at 567-242-0451.