Lady Lynx best familiar foe by 1-0 count

REHOBOTH, N.M.

The final game of the Rehoboth round-robin girls’ soccer tournament pitted two familiar foes – the Lady Lynx and the Hatch Valley Lady Bears.

In a fitting finale, Rehoboth bested the Lady Bears by a 1-0 count that gave the Lynx the tournament title.

“We’ve never done this before, so this is exciting,” Rehoboth midfielder Naomi Philips said of winning the school’s own tournament.

“This is my senior year,” she said, “and I’m trying to make the most of it and I got to accomplish that right from the get-go.”

In 2019, the two teams played for the championship game and Hatch Valley won that contest in a shootout.

“We love coming here and it’s always a great tournament,” Hatch Valley coach Arturo Bustillos said. “We’ve been doing very good lately here at this tournament and today it was just one goal that was the deciding factor, so I’m really proud of my girls.”

The Lynx got the only score at the start of the second half when freshman Asher Arviso flicked a strong corner kick as the ball ricocheted off a Hatch Valley player for the goal at the 44-minute mark.

“I was yelling to attack the goal,” Rehoboth coach Philip Frederiksen said. “I’m glad that somebody did that.”

Admittedly, the second-year coach said he would have liked his team to have scored in the early going as they had a handful of threatening attacks.

“I would have liked to have put our mark on the game a little bit earlier,” he said. “I felt a bit nervous, not having scored in the first half but we stuck with it.”

After watching Hatch Valley on the opening day of the two-day tournament, Frederiksen said was concerned with the Bears’ defense.

“They’ve got a very solid backline so we had a hard time penetrating,” he said. “It took us all the way into second half to get there so I knew that was gonna be a struggle because they got some tough players.”

Bustillos was equally impressed with Rehoboth’s midfielders.

“They have a very good mid-section,” he said. “They were able to switch the ball on us quite a bit. They’re very fast and we couldn’t keep up with them half the time so they deserved to win.”

Frederiksen said they want to exploit that part of their game for the rest of the year as Rehoboth returns a veteran squad.

“We’ve got a good core from last year,” the Rehoboth coach said. “We had a short season with COVID last year, and so we got some experience and leadership on the team.

“We’re strong in the middle and we’ve got a lot of speed,” he added, “so we’re blessed with speed on defense and offense. That’s our style … and we’re going to rely on that speed in the back.”

With the teams’ experience, Philips said they want to pick up where they left off from the 2020 abbreviated soccer season that was delayed for seven months due to the global pandemic.

“For the most part, we’re continuing what we did this past spring,” she said. “It’s a lot of the same players and I feel like we have just grown. We’re growing even more because we’ve been playing together for so long.”

Rehoboth goalie Kora Zylstra said the team is displaying great chemistry and that showed during the Rehoboth tournament.

“We have great camaraderie,” she said. “We’ve been playing together for a really long time so it’s fun to be almost at our peak of this and I just hope to have a good senior year because this is our last hurrah.”

As leaders of the team, Zylstra said she’s embracing that role for some of the younger talent on the Rehoboth team.

“I think it’ll be fun to come back in a couple of years and see how much they’ve improved,” she said.

For the tournament, the Lynx tallied seven goals and they surrendered one as they opened the season with a 3-0 record.

“Personally, I think that’s my fault,” Zylstra said of the lone goal they gave up to the Piedra Vista JV squad. “It was just a bad play and it got through a lot of people to get the goal.

“That was rough,” she said. “It did catch us off guard, but we bounced back and, you know, we scored two more in the second half.”

In that contest, Rehoboth rallied for a 3-1 win over the younger PV squad. In its other contest, the Lynx shutout Santa Fe’s ATC (Academy for Technology and The Classics) by a 4-0 count.

“The defense did an amazing job,” Zylstra said. “I felt very safe being in the back, knowing that Maggi (Van Drunen) would be there to clear out the ball for me or that Alyssa (Chavez) was doing really, really good on the right side.”

The Lynx would have played Miyamura on Wednesday, as the results were not available at press time.

On Friday, Rehoboth will host Grants and on Tuesday they will play at Gallup.

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