It’s been a challenging season for the Thunder Mountain High School boys soccer team who sport an 0-6 record overall and in conference, but that’s not to say there isn’t still plenty to be optimistic about for the future.
Head coach Tim Lewis explained that the fundamentals continue to be a focal point as the team still has many players learning new positions.
“We’ll have a lot of stuff to work on going into next year but the team is still positive,” Lewis said. “We lost 99% of our goals because last year for varsity, 90% of the goals were scored by seniors and we had one goal that was scored by a junior that’s now a senior. So, we knew scoring was going to be something we were going to have to work on this year.”
The Falcons lost two home games against Ketchikan on Friday and Saturday, 7-2 on Friday and 5-1 on Saturday. Lewis explained that Friday’s game got off to a bad start, which resulted in giving up most of the match’s goals early on, making it challenging to recover from. Lewis added that the team was able to learn from some of the mistakes made on Friday and apply those lessons going into the following game.
“We gave up a lot of goals, but we rebounded in the second half and came from a 5-0 tally to have a 2-2 tally in the second half, so getting some goals was really nice,” Lewis said. “We were able to take some of that momentum into Saturday’s game. We didn’t let up as many goals and were able to score one, as well. We worked on some things, made some adjustments and so it was nice to see some progress between the two days.”
On Friday TMHS senior Matthew Spratt and junior Reese Kugelmann scored the Falcons’ two goals and senior Preston Lam was the lone scorer for Saturday’s game.
“We’re getting better touches on the ball, better movement off of the ball,” Lewis said. “There’s been a lot of learning from the younger players who’ve been playing JV for the last two or three years, so just seeing the improvement has been good.”
Next up for the Falcons, the team will play Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé at Adair-Kennedy Field at 5:15 p.m. on Tuesday.
• Contact reporter Jonson Kuhn at jonson.kuhn@juneauempire.com.
