Allison Kolhouse
Despite nearly dominating the first half Saturday afternoon, Class 3A co-No. 20 Columbus North found itself trailing Greenfield-Central 1-0.
The second half was a different story. The Bull Dogs again controlled play for most of the time, but this time, they were able to capitalize on three corner kicks to claim a 3-1 girls soccer victory.
“I’m just really proud,” said senior Allison Kolhouse, who scored two of the goals. “We’ve (come from behind) before, and the fact that we’ve done it before definitely helps not get our heads down. It helped our energy stay up because we knew that we could come back. Rethinking at half and realizing that we needed to step it up, we needed to play together and I think that we knew we could do that. We just had to do it.”
Kolhouse put North (8-1-1) on the board just 38 seconds into the second half when she headed in a corner kick from Avery Baker. Ten minutes later, sophomore Grace Bethuram scored off another Baker corner kick to give the Bull Dogs the lead.
Grace Bethuram
“Avery had a great ball in from the corner, and it bounced around and I just finished it,” Bethuram said. “It was really a team effort.”
The score remained 2-1 until the 77th minute when Bethuram took a corner kick that Brooklyn Pendleton headed across the box to Kohlouse, who finished for the 3-1 advantage.
“That was the talking point in the pregame speech, that we are a team that can dominate in the box on set pieces, and we wanted to maximize those,” North coach David Young said. “Honestly, I don’t think we had enough of them. We should have had probably 10 to 12 corners.”
North outshot the Cougars 13-6, putting seven shots on goal to three for Greenfield-Central (4-5). Danika Hoehn and Gabby Revell each played a half in goal for the Bull Dogs, and each recorded one save.
The Cougars had taken the lead on a goal by Aubrey Bush in the 28th minute. That was one of only two shots Greenfield-Central managed during the first half.
“I felt like the first 40 minutes, at times, we were the better team, but we weren’t consistently the better team,” Young said. “We got complacent on a few opportunities. We had a miscommunication in the back, and they scored the one. We made a few adjustments, pulled (a forward) back into the midfield just to help win balls a little bit, but it was just giving more effort, outworking the other team. That’s what we had to do as a unit.”
“We just talked about how our energy needs to be up,” Bethuram added. “We need to work together. We know when we work together, and when we combine and we communicate, we can come back from anything. We just had to work together, keep our energy up and really communicate throughout the game to get the win. I’d really like to thank all my coaches because they talked us up during halftime. Without them, we couldn’t have done it.”
