Between the soccer match and volleyball match - it was a pretty electric night . Between the two matches had to be close to 3,000 people.
Pitt men soccer
- Thread starter ThePanthers
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This is a great analysis. But, I think the team’s different approach was very apparent against UNC. One goal was just a credit to Jasper’s offensive brilliance. He went around that UNC defender like he was a statue. (I have watched the video 5 times and still can’t tell if he nutmegged him.) The other three goals came from pace. Watch the Pitt forwards simply outrun the UNC defense. We might have discovered a new offensive weapon too. That chip was a brilliant goal. Very decisively taken. That was a Ronaldhino goal.
The defense was better. How much of that was due to UNC being shellshocked we will see in upcoming matches.
But that’s not right either. We always used to have two opponents in section that were like that. I remember once I was 5 minutes late for a game and my daughter and all the starters were already out and on the bench and it was 10-0. On that occasion I think the final was 17-0. But try going 72 minutes against an opponent like that without scoring. It can be just as demoralizing and embarrassing for a team like that to see teams ping the ball around and pass up scoring opportunities for 72 minutes. And then when JV players have their only chance at a varsity goal, they are going to take it.
I don’t think it’s any more embarrassing for a team to see 10-0 in the paper or 17-0 in the paper…but I was talking with a couple of my coaching buddies after the 30-0 game last week and they both said that the Fox Chapel coach should have been made to call the real score into the paper, because that’s embarrassing enough for him. And of course he did.
Believe me when I tell you that it was obvious that the players from both teams were not happy about how it played out. The young players who didn't normally get to play in a varsity game would have loved to have scored a goal, but instead they spent long stretches just passing the ball around like it was a pregame warmup or a practice. The opposing players knew that they were just being toyed with, and when does anyone ever feel good about that?
They need to have some sort of mercy rule. Once the score gets to a certain point the game ends. Or if it's past a certain point the second half gets reduced to 20 or 10 minutes or something. Or in a game like that, when everyone knew before it even started that it was going to get really bad really fast, allow the coaches to agree to only play 20 minute halves or something. There wasn't anyone who gained anything from that game playing out the way that it did.
And you know my niece's team was pretty good, they had a couple section opponents where the games were just like that. Every one of them was pointless.
Why the eff was Fox Chapel playing Southmoreland? Based on size, demographics, and geography, that's about as bizarre a soccer matchup as there could be.
When I was an assistant coach, we were beating our opponent 10-0 at the half. I instructed our scoreboard operator to stop at 6 goals. Then at halftime it started to rain a little and I told my head coach at the time to ask the other coach if she wanted to call the game early. He said the referees would never allow it. So I approached the referees and asked them myself. They said yes as long as it was agreeable with the other coaches. I asked the coach and she was extremely thankful. She said let’s play ten more minutes and shorten the game by 30 minutes
That was it.
and that was a game I was instructing our players to keep the ball in the first half. When they are playing keep away vs a team like that, even 5 minutes of keep away is an absolute eternity. Then try doing that for an entire half. There is no solution, other than shortening the game. This same coach told me that she thought keep away is often more embarrassing than goals against.
Plus, keep-away exhausts the opponent. It reminds me of Jose’s welcome to boxing sparring sessions we have all been through. We throw punches and hit air. Jose barely taps us. We are gasping for air. He is calmly smiling. Trust me. This both sucks and is highly motivational.
I don’t think there are any good answers, but IMO, best way to handle these things is to
1. Play the backups
2. Encourage offensive play. This is counter-intuitive, but it will increase the chance the opponent will get a scoring opportunity. Perhaps even score one.
3. Shorten the game. Lightening in the area sounds about right, LOL.
4. If it isn’t insulting (one team is a new program, or very young) declare the lightening a false alarm and have a mixed practice consisting of SSGs.
The thing is, the overmatched team knows they won’t win the game, but they might win some battles.
A referee told me on Saturday that he reffed Elwood City vs North Catholic last week. Elwood city just restarted their program. The ref said he lost count at 37-0. He said there was a kid who was left on the field to score 12 goals because he was going after some scoring record. I know with my girls teams when we had opponents like that, a player was out of the game after 3 goals…and if she didn’t have 3 before the team had 10, then she was still out of the game.
AAAA is the highest classification locally. And when the post gazette publishes the WPIAL goal leaders, normally you have to skim through 20-30 A, AA, AAA players before you find the first AAAA player. It’s just very challenging to score goals in the highest classification.
Pitt's defense is better when teams play straight-up and don't sit and counter, getting us in 1 on 1s down the flanks.
I might even say the difference between 1A and 4A WPIAL soccer is greater than any other WPIAL sport. Something I've thought about. How would 1A and 2A Boys teams do in a 4A Girls league? I cant imagine some 1A Boys teams beating 4A Girls teams
Didnt those unbeatable US Women’s national teams lose to high school boys teams in Olympic tune ups? Thinking you are way, way off base here.
If I were Ellwood City coach, I’d pick up some boxers/wrestlers/ football players to make sure NC remembered the rematch.
Pro/rel for WPIAL soccer, 😛
Maybe, but the boys would need to be really bad. Even at the middle school level, the bulk of the best players on the tine Catholic school teams are boys. Post-puberty, that gap really widens. A boy can’t help but get a ton bigger/faster/stronger throughout high school. Girls are pretty close to full physical development. Hence, the number of teenage girls are every olympics/ US Open. Also, if more could compete, I’d expect St. Joe’s to end up with a few elite girls for its Co-ed team.
Yes, they lost to 9th or 10th graders from FC Dallas but we're talking about some of the best 9th and 10th graders in the nation. I mean I could be wrong but I just don't see a bad 1A Boys team beating a good 4A Girls team.
I’ll give you an example. Maybe not the best but I’ll try. In the off-season some of my girls players played in a coed indoor league. There was a team of kids from USC every year who didn’t take themselves seriously. They did it for fun and even spent half the time laughing at themselves. These kids were like a bunch of chess players, computer needs, band kids, etc. and every week they would bring a ringer or two from the USC soccer team, or a couple athletes from the football team. One year they even brought Robbie Mertz who played for the Riverhounds. Or maybe it was his brother who is a captain at Delaware currently. And they would get pounded by my girls. Nothing funnier than seeing these kids get their ankles broken and fall to the turf by the girls as they dribbled around them. But they had fun. I truly believe that any of the top 12 AAAA girls programs would beat the bottom half A teams, as these schools are pulling kids out of the school hallways just to field a lineup. Obviously programs like Greensburg Central Catholic aren’t doing that. They would whip the girls. But their schedule every week is littered with teams who wouldnt.
I think the top 4A girls would beat MOST 1A boys, maybe half the 2A boys and even some 3A boys. For those smaller schools, the best athletes are still playing football. I'll take elite female soccer players over the unathletic boys just playing soccer "for fun." The boys may be bigger, stronger, faster, but extremely unskilled and I think the girls would pick them apart with their passing and organization.
For some reason, this thought experiment was taking up way too much space in my brain. Thank you for the definitive answer.
When my daughter played a year of college soccer at Howard CC in Maryland, they where really great, they went to the national tournament and finished 5th in the Nation in NJCAA. She was mostly a bench player, but because they'd win by an average of 7-1 in the regular season, she'd get a lot of playing time, she even scored a goal once, which was cool. But a lot of the time, she'd be out there playing half an hour instructed to just play keep away, because they'd be winning 10-0 or 13-1 or 11-2 and the coach would just shut it down. I think 13 was the max goals they scored.
The younger players who didn't normally get to play in a varsity game, definitely don't want a mercy rule, I remember being in that position, I would of hated losing my little bit of playing time, even if my team was getting killed.
I think they would, unless the boys where not schooled well in soccer, like they never played much before joining this team, if they where near the same experience level in years played, as the girls, I think they win.
Need to win enough games to land a Top 4 national seed so we can have an Elite 8 game at home. It would suck to have to go to Georgetown, Clemson, Washington, etc in the Elite 8.
How bout WVU, Pitt, Marshall, Akron ranked 4-7? This region is to college soccer as to what the south is to college football
Except the region isn’t filling the rosters with local players. So not really.
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