The Sacred Heart Saints ladies鈥� soccer team found themselves in the 鈥楪roup of Death鈥� at the Moose Jaw Soccerfest tournament this past weekend, matching up with two of the top 3A programs in the province, taking on Regina LeBoldus and Prince Albert St. Mary, as well as Estevan.
The stiff competition combined with a short bench resulted in a Friday full of struggles for the Saints, as the haloed ladies fell to both LeBoldus and St. Mary by scores of 5-0 and 8-3 before trouncing Estevan 5-0 to finish in third place in their group. 鈥淲e had some girls missing for the first day, so that was a bit of a problem for us for the round-robin,鈥� suggested SHHS head coach Alfredo Bermudez, adding that missing some of his starters provided other players with an opportunity to gain some much needed game time experience. 鈥淭here were some girls that were surprised that they were staying on the field for the whole game, but I told them that they have to take advantage of that and they did, even though we didn鈥檛 win all the games we still played well and got experience.鈥�
Saturday saw the arrival of some reinforcements for the Lady Saints, just in time for their Third Place playoff round one game against Regina Luther College; a game that the Lady Saints completely dominated, winning 11-0.
The Saints carried their domination over to the Third Place group final game, once again filling the back of the net in a 6-0 win over Lloydminster Holy Rosary to finish the tournament in ninth place. 鈥淚 think it was a great performance from the girls,鈥� mentioned Bermudez. 鈥淲e lost two games but I鈥檓 not really disappointed about that because we played bigger schools that are not in our division, and we were missing a few players for Friday.
鈥淏ut when we started playing teams in our division, that was when we started to come out on top. We played Estevan in round-robin, then Luther in playoffs and Lloydminster - Holy Rosary and won all of them against schools our size.鈥�
Kendra Varjassy led the Lady Saints in scoring with 14 goals and eight assists in the five game tournament while fellow team captain Allison Berge also had a strong weekend scoring seven goals and picking up three helpers.
Four other Lady Saints notched a goal for Sacred Heart in the competition as Brooke Vranai, Jordin Holinaty, Shae-lyn Slusarchuk and Emma Pindus all found the scoresheet at some point on the weekend.
Next up
The next action for the Sacred Heart Saints ladies鈥� soccer team will be this coming weekend when they head to Prince Albert for their third tournament of the season.
