by Rusty Ellis
The Stone Memorial Lady Panthers scored early and often in their 9-0 win over Upperman on Thursday night.
Emma Thompson got the scoring started with her goal in the fifth minute, and Peyton McGinnis added on with her goal just two minutes later to make it 2-0. After Thompson scored her second goal of the match in the 11th minute, Ellie Strong got in on the scoring with a goal in the 13th minute to make it 4-0.
Casey Hepburn and Shelby Vitous struck less than a minute apart in the 19th and 20th minutes, respectively, and Alina Thompson scored the first of her two goals in the 28th minute to run the score to 7-0.
Aubrey Murray knocked the eighth goal of the contest through in the 33rd minute, and Thompson rounded out the game with her goal in the 38th minute.
For head coach Tyler Rutherford, it was a nice bounce-back effort from the Lady Panthers’ loss on Tuesday.
“I think we played a great game of soccer, and I think there’s a lot of little things we can hone in on,” Rutherford said. “There’s little things we’ve been working on for the past few weeks, and there’s still some cleaning up to do, but overall I’m very happy with the way we bounced back. We played Tuesday night against Chattanooga Christian and we were on the wrong end of it.”
Bouncing back from a deflating loss is never easy, especially at the high school level. What Rutherford said he liked the most about the effort from his players on Tuesday was how they were able to mentally move on from Tuesday and focus on the game in front of them.
“The conversation we had was about how to fight through adversity,” Rutherford said. “What we’ve tried to convey to them is that it’s not really the adversity that matters, it’s how you respond to it…it’s hard to come out of a game where you’re on the losing end in a big way, but I liked how they were able to settle in and play soccer.”
Stone Memorial will be back in action on Aug. 24 when they take on White County in their home-opener, while Upperman will face DeKalb County in Smithville on Aug. 22.
