Mendota senior forward Johan Cortez said the team learned a lot from watching film of the Trojans loss to Moline on Tuesday.

“We watched the film the next day and saw a lot of flaws in how we played,” Cortez said. “We weren’t shifting or moving as a team and left too much open space in the middle of the field.”

On Saturday during the 30th Streator Boys Soccer Invitational, Cortez and his teammates made the needed adjustments.

Mendota (4-1) opened the event with an 8-1 win over the host Bulldogs. The Trojans then slipped past Bartonville Limestone 3-2 before completing the undefeated day with a 3-0 shutout against Bloomington High School.

“Coming into today the focus for us was to clean that up and I feel like we did,” said Cortez, who finished the tournament with four goals and five assists. “I also think we did a better job of playing the ball out wide on offense and then working toward the middle or making passes to guys running down the middle.”

On the day, Mendota enjoyed contributions from Cesar Casas (four goals, two assists), Isaac Diaz (three goals, two assists), Ramiro Palacios (two goals), Sebastian Carlos (one goal, one assist), Cole Kleckner (one assist) and Alex Beetz (one assist).

Goalkeeper Mateo Goy played all three games, earning a shutout against Bloomington.

“We bunched up way too much against Moline and the last three days of practice was focused on having better spacing,” Mendota coach Nick Myers said. “We did a much better job with that today.

“We also basically have new guys in our back line, so that’s something we’ve been trying to sort out, but I thought as the day went along, we played better back there.

“That last game we had tired legs, but the guys fought through it.”

After the loss to Mendota, in which Evan Graff scored off an assist from Mason Decker, Streator (0-5) fell to both Limestone and Bloomington by 2-0 scores.

“This is a tournament, no matter what year, we host to gain experience,” Streator coach J.T. Huey said. “These three games back-to-back-to-back give us a great opportunity to see what our strengths are and the aspects we need to improve on.

“It may have seemed like a tough day from the kid’s perspective, but as a coach I saw a lot of things moving forward that we can work on to be better. When you lose 10 of 11 starters from a previous season there is going to be struggles for the newer guys, but I feel today really helped a lot of our less experienced guys understand a little bit better what it takes at the varsity level. Today is going to pay off for us down the road.

“We had positives today. We played a very tough Mendota team to a one-goal game at halftime, actually scored on them for the first time in forever, and the other two games we had chances but just didn’t convert”.

Both squads we be back in action and open their respective conference schedules on Tuesday. Mendota will be at Riverdale for a Three Rivers Conference match, while Streator travels to take on Reed-Custer in an Illinois Central Eight Conference contest.