College soccer: Dalton State men, women close regular season with wins as SSAC tourney is set

Published 10:00 am Monday, October 30, 2023

Both the men’s and women’s soccer team finished out the 2023 regular season slate with Saturday wins to lock in their seeds for the upcoming Southern States Athletic Conference tournament.

The Roadrunner men knocked off Blue Mountain Christian 4-0 to secure the second seed in the conference. Dalton State, which finishes the regular season at 8-1-1 in conference, took second with 25 seeding points, finishing three behind Mobile, who had 28 and handed DSC their lone loss of the year.

Dalton State will play seventh-seeded Life at home in the quarterfinal round of the conference tourney later this week. The winners of the quarterfinal games will advance to the semifinals in Montgomery, Alabama, next week.

The DSC women defeated BMC 2-0 on Saturday and will be the fifth seed in the SSAC tournament after finishing with a 6-4 conference record and 18 seeding points, one behind Thomas. The Lady Roadrunners will travel to Thomas to play in the SSAC quarterfinals.

The 4-0 win by the Dalton State men on Saturday was scoreless through 60 minutes of play, but the Roadrunners peppered in four goals in the final 30 minutes.

Coahulla Creek High School product Jaime Mendiola scored the first goal of the game in the 62nd minute off of assists from Josh Ramos and Jimson St. Louis, then St. Louis got a goal of his own less than three minutes later from a Jack Stainrod assist.

Jack Brown netted the third goal of the game in the 74th minute with an assist from Dalton High grad Filemon Quintero, and DSC leading scorer Stainrod scored his 12th goal of the regular season to wrap up the scoring with just over a minute to play.

The Roadrunner defense didn’t allow a single shot from Blue Mountain. Dalton State had just two shots in the scoreless first half but piled up nine after halftime to finish with 11 total and seven on goal.

While the men scored all of their goals after halftime, it was a pair of first-half scores that led the Lady Roadrunners to a 2-0 victory and to polish off their best conference regular season by winning percentage at .633 since starting play in 2016.

Ava Vandoren scored just 6:24 into the game on a Ria Cox assist, and Cox scored the second goal at the 13:54 mark. The final 76 minutes of play went by without any more scoring, but the two goals were all Dalton State needed thanks to the play of keeper Brooke Alvarez, a former Northwest Whitfield Lady Bruin.

Blue Mountain tallied six shots on goal to the four for DSC, but Alvarez stopped all six shots.