With its Hoosier Hills Conference opener coming up tonight at Seymour, Columbus East boys soccer coach Josh Gonsior was hoping to be able to rest some of his starters in the second half of Wednesday’s battle with East Central.
The Trojans, however, hung around with the Olympians in a close enough game that Gonsior couldn’t pull his top players until late in the contest. By that time, East had scored a pair of goals in what would become a 2-0 victory.
“We did get everybody on the bench in, so we were able to get them valuable game time and build that bench up a little bit,” Gonsior said. “As we go into conference play, I’m really looking forward to the ‘O’ Cup (today) and getting some more kids in the game and getting that experience.”
The Olympians (3-2-1) had a few excellent chances throughout the first half. Branson Young had a shot stopped on a diving save in the ninth minute and put one just over the crossbar in the 17th and 38th minutes.
Finally in the final minute of the first half, Young broke the ice. He finished a cross from Dathan Wolf to give East a 1-0 lead.
“I had quite a few chances and just wasn’t able to put them away with nobody on me,” Young said. “It was pretty frustrating, so being able to put that one away was a confidence booster, not just for myself, but for us as a team, and I think it led to our second goal there.”
The second goal came in the 53rd minute. Chris Quisenberry, who also had a couple of scoring opportunities in the first half, stole the ball near midfield, and dribbled in for a goal.
“I think we definitely deserved that,” Quisenberry said. “We may not played our best battle, but we were gritty, we saw it out and the second goal felt great to get in. It’s definitely a confidence booster going into Seymour. We know we have small details that we need to fix, but overall, I think we’re playing good and we’re building on the right stuff.”
East finished with a 20-10 shot advantage, putting nine shots on goal to two for the Trojans.
“We didn’t do a very good job of finishing our chances, obviously,” Gonsior said. “We had quite a few shots, and we just couldn’t put them in the back of the net.”
Gavin Edgecomb, who got the start in place of a resting Pete Coriden in goal, recorded two saves for the Olympians.
East played the final 51 minutes with a man advantage after the Trojans’ starting keeper was issued a red card for a tackle on Quisenberry outside the box.
“You have to give credit to East Central playing tough, even going a man down, and forcing us to play away from our strengths,” Gonsior said. “We should have used our wide field and moved the ball around and made them run around, and I thought they did a really good job of forcing us to play a different style. Eventually getting that goal really helped us a lot, and I think it gave us the opportunity to kind of dictate the pace of the game a little bit better.”
