Girls soccer: Dixon dominates possession in home win over Stillman Valley

DIXON – It took a while Thursday afternoon for the Dixon girls soccer team to get going against a stingy Stillman Valley defense.

But once they broke through, the Duchesses turned up the offensive pressure on the Cardinals. Led by Katie Drew’s hat trick, they won the Big Northern Conference game 4-0 in the long-awaited home opener at A.C. Bowers Field.

“We have tried many different formations; we tried this one Tuesday and it was kind of working, but I feel like it cemented tonight,” Dixon coach Kristin Carlson said. “I thought they played great. There were good passes, good teamwork.

“Stillman Valley is a good, strong team; they were all over us, and we were passing around them and keeping possession tonight. I thought that was great.”

In the Duchesses’ fourth attempt at their first home game of the season, the weather finally cooperated with a beautiful day of abundant sunshine and a light breeze.

The teams went back and forth for the first several minutes, then Dixon (7-2, 4-1 BNC) started to control possession. Dixon racked up 10 shots in the first half, but only half of them were on target, and two of those were goals by Drew.

Several of the misses were too high or too wide, and a few of them just missed. But Drew finally broke through in the 32nd minute, when she took a pass from Rylee Pfoutz and knocked it into the net. The Stillman goalkeeper got a hand on it, but couldn’t deflect it away with 8:15 left in the first half.

The score stayed 1-0 until the final seconds of the half, when Drew dribbled the ball down into the box and eventually popped a shot over the keeper and under the crossbar with 1.9 seconds to play before halftime.

“I knew there ware 40 seconds when I got the ball, and then I dribbled down and thought there couldn’t be much left and I’d better get it off,” Drew said about cutting it close with her second score. “We made the changes that we needed to in the first half, then at halftime talked about what we had to keep doing. In the second half, I think we really clicked as a team and were getting the shots off a lot more rapidly.”

“I’d like to have the last five seconds of the first half back,” Stillman Valley coach Erin McMaster said with a wry smile. “That was great timing by her, and it gave them some momentum going into halftime.”

Dixon controlled the possession for the first 25 minutes of the second half, and Drew completed her hat trick with 30:13 remaining. Makenzie Toms tracked down the ball in a wide-open area, then passed it up toward Drew, who outran the defense to the pass and shot the ball through the keeper’s hands for a 3-0 lead.

“The first half, we played better as a unit collapsing on the ball, and forcing them to take outside shots or shots they didn’t want to take, so they had a lot of shots on us, but not a lot on goal,” McMaster said. “The second half, they stepped it up and were able to take advantage of our weaknesses a little more.”

Maggie Van Sickle finished off the scoring for Dixon with 11:51 to play, corralling a clear-out by Stillman (5-9) and kicking it right through the keeper’s hands from about 15 yards out for a 4-0 margin.

“I saw it coming right at me, and I just tried to shoot it to the corner,” Van Sickle said. “I thought it had a chance, but I wasn’t sure. It was a good shot, but it was kind of lucky that it got through. I’m just happy it went in.”

The Duchesses outshot Stillman 18-9, with a 9-6 edge on target. Hanna Lengquist was stellar in goal for Dixon, making six saves and also tracking down several other balls that made their way into the halfback box to thwart possible scoring chances for the Cardinals. Sweeper Madison Cumberland anchored a strong effort by Dixon’s back-line defense.

Both Drew and Van Sickle credited the Duchesses’ ability to control things and spend most of the game in the Cardinals’ end of the field to lots of work on passing in practice, and putting those lessons to good use in the game.

“We’ve been working a lot on making sure we pass as a team and to a teammate, and that’s important to keeping possession,” Drew said. “I think we did really well as a team today, and we all played really well.”

“We’re really working on our passes at practice, and we’ve got to thank the coaches for that. They really helped us out there,” Van Sickle added. “I thought everybody in the team played a good game today.”