Deer Isle-Stonington High School sophomore Sam Knowlton fights for possession of the ball against a Bangor Christian player during a home game on September 21. By Jack Scott
Deer Isle— The boys soccer team lost a bewildering game at Jonesport 4-0 on September 18. Jonesport has always been prone to have rabid fans, but this seemed to go to another level of verbal insults, and from players also. Best to let this go as we suffered several yellow cards, and this took the notion of hostile environment to another level. We have lost several games by much more one-sided scores, but sportsmanship was always strong from both sides.
The boys lost to Bangor Christian 2-0 on September 20 in a well-played game for us. Despite the losing score, the team felt like it was a moral victory to hold BC to only 2 goals. As BC pressed our goal, their defense was 10 to 20 yards on our side of the midfield stripe. We had several breakaways that almost made them pay by getting behind their defense, but not quite enough.
Our strategy was to plug the goal mouth and frustrate the Bangor Christian offense so we were committed to defense first. Their first goal was chipped over the head of goalie Elijah Stinson with seven minutes left in the first half. The defense was stalwart, and I was impressed with the defensive presence of Jacob Gell, who stopped many of the Bangor Christian drives on defense. This was our best game yet and it should give the team some confidence to continue to improve.
The boys are 0-7 and are looking for a win. Looking ahead, we have another busy week. If we can carry some momentum from the Bangor Christian game, we should be able to surprise the teams that ran over us earlier in the season. Once again, it is a building year, but we have to start showing progress on the learning curve.