Lady Cats put the pressure on in season-opening victory

Published 8:00 pm Tuesday, February 23, 2016

The pressure from the Dalton High School girls soccer team’s offensive attack was as constant as the pouring rain Tuesday night as the Lady Catamounts opened the season with a 2-0 victory on the road at Ringgold. Dalton had 24 shots to just two for the Lady Tigers.

While he was certainly happy to open the season with a victory, Dalton coach Tony Carlson thought his team could have been more efficient in its attack. Despite the 24 attempts, Ringgold was only forced to make six saves as shots repeatedly were off the mark.

“We really need to improve our shots on goal ratio,” Carlson said. “We just shot and weren’t looking up to see where the goal was. I thought we had a lot of chances but we need to put them on the goal more.”

The Lady Cats were able to keep the ball in their attacking half of the field for most of the game. However, both teams struggled to maintain possession and the result was a lot of one team kicking directly to the other.

Several of Dalton’s opportunities to threaten the Lady Tigers’ goal came from misplayed balls by the Ringgold defenders. Therefore, Carlson thought his team needed to control possession and create more chances.

“We’ve got to work better, even though we maintained possession, it wasn’t under control,” Carlson said. “What I saw was more pinball and just kicking the ball back and forth. We need to do better at being under control and using that to create goal-scoring chances.”

Dalton didn’t score from the run of play as each of its goals came from a corner kick in the first half. The first was about midway through the period. Vanessa Agundiz took the set piece and fired it into the box, but the ball deflected off of a Ringgold defender and fell to Dalton’s Deanna Marquez.

The senior midfielder lofted a shot from 15 yards away and just left of the center of the field. It soared into the right corner for the Lady Cats’ first goal of the season.

The second goal came about 10 minutes later. Agundiz again took the corner and connected with freshman Monse Hernandez, who was able to chip the ball into the net.

With a roster deep with seniors, Carlson said it was encouraging to see a freshman contribute right away by scoring the goal. He has big expectations for this year and said he wanted the team to make a statement in its opening game.

While he admitted it’s always good to get a victory away from home, the contest showed that his team isn’t quite where he wants it to be.

“This was our first true game and we wanted to come out and show what Dalton was going to be about this year,” Carlson said. “What we saw is we still have some rust. We didn’t see the real Dalton tonight. But it was a good first step.”