Dylan Brady, boys soccer
FREMONT – A season ago, the Ross boys soccer team struggled to produce offense.
If Monday night is any indication of things to come, lack of offense will not be an issue in 2017.
The Little Giants scored early and often Monday night and they continued to pour it on throughout, winning in dominant fashion, 10-0, over Sandusky Perkins.
“Last year it was a 1-1 tie with these guys,” coach Alex Coressel said. “We outshot them a lot, but we weren’t getting good looks, shooting too far out, settling for whatever was given to us. This time we took what we wanted.”
No one took more than Dylan Brady. The Little Giants’ junior forward opened the season by potting a career-high five goals. He scored the first three goals of the game, netting his hat trick by the midpoint of the first half.
“I really was looking for my teammates the rest of the game,” Brady said, “but if the opportunity opens up for me to shoot, I’m going to score.”
The Little Giants closed out the half with goals from Sam Durbin and Alex Slemmer. Despite the commanding 5-0 halftime lead, Coressel thought his team let its foot off the gas pedal.
“For the first 20 minutes, we took it to them, but in the second 20 minutes we got very lazy,” Coressel said. “We had a lot of bad first-touches, getting too cutesy. And that was the talk at halftime.”
The Little Giants heeded their coach’s words and continued to push on in the second half.
Brady scored goal No. 4 with an assist from Durbin, followed by Slemmer’s second goal of the night, off another Durbin assist.
Brady collected his fifth on a penalty kick. Kevin Navarro and Jared Atkins rounded out the scoring.
Chris Navarro and Drew Miesle also had assists.
“We’re capable of a lot,” Brady said of the offense. “We have lot of young guys coming off the bench and we looked fast, running around the defense. We should be able to score a lot of goals this year.”
While the offense lit up the scoreboard, Coressel took pleasure from his defense. Goalkeeper Mikey Contreras didn’t have to make any saves as the defense kept the ball out of danger.
“The defense was outstanding, not something we saw a lot of last year,” Coressel said. “It got us our first 0 on the board for the opposing team in quite a while. I think a lot of the young guys stepped up, Alec Slemmer stepped up.”
Ross (1-0) returns to action Wednesday at Port Clinton with a kickoff at 5 p.m.