ELIZABETHTOWN – Four different players scored goals as East Bladen pulled away from a 1-0 halftime lead and defeated East Columbus 4-0 in Waccamaw Conference girls soccer action Tuesday night.
Coach Jay Raynor’s Lady Eagles improved to 3-0 in Waccamaw play and 4-0-1 overall and will travel to East Columbus Thursday night. The Lady Gators are 1-1 in league play and 1-2 overall.
Senior Heidi Rebollar banged in the only Lady Eagle goal in the 1st half. “We had a tough time tonight but got the result,” stated Raynor. “A lot of our issues were self-inflicted but have to also give credit to East Columbus. They may have less experienced players but they make up for that with their effort. They wanted it more at times especially early on with the score 1-0.”
Raynor continued, “Our girls still did some great things. We moved the ball well in spells, we earned a shutout, and everyone played a lot of minutes. I think we were down on ourselves and expected to play similar to how we did last night. We often get jaded when we put goals in the back of the net and expect that to be every night. The biggest factor of that being ourselves and our mentality. The other factor being our opponent.”
The Lady Gators had a chance to tie the game with a penalty kick in the 2nd half but the kick hit the bar and bounced right back to the kicker who illegally touched it.
“That changed the game,” noted Raynor. “We went down not much long after and put away our second goal. We moved some pieces around and got Gabby (Rebollar) into the midfield and that resulted in us getting some more promising attacks. Gabby helped us get our scoring together last year and with us not finding the net, I thought we might roll that look out there. It paid off as the girls scored 3 goals in the second half.
Junior Jackie Medina-Leal fired in the 1st East Bladen goal of the 2nd half, and sophomore Gabby Rebollar knocked in a goal after that. Freshman Marlee Potter scored the final Lady Eagle goal.
“Proud of the shutout and our girls pushing through adversity,” concluded Raynor. “I thought we played some our better soccer of the night on the backend of the game.”
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