Girls soccer: Frontier notches shutout in opener - The Recorder

WHATELY — The Ware girls soccer program made the jump into the Pioneer North Division this season, and while it showed promise in its first action of the new year, it didn’t have enough to top Pioneer North regular Frontier. The Red Hawks controlled the game from start to finish, earning a 2-0 victory on Tuesday in the teams’ league opener at Herlihy Field.

Senior Natalie Denkiewicz picked up where she left off a year ago, scoring the first goal of the game to give Frontier an early 1-0 lead.

Samantha Scanlon swung the ball to Denkiewicz in the middle, and she used her speed to get a one-on-one with Ware goalie Abby Hayman. Denkiewicz put a move on the keeper to get an open net where she lightly tucked it in to put the Red Hawks up.

“I knew I was going to beat her to it,” Denkiewicz said, “so I touch-passed it a little bit and I knew then I’d have an open goal so I would just have to put it in. So that was nice. I kind of touched it a little too far and took an extra touch there to get past her.”

The Frontier attack pushed forward, but was unable to build on its early lead until the second half when it earned a corner kick.

Denkiewicz stepped to take the kick in the left corner and felt she didn’t strike the ball cleanly. Instead, it curved its way past Hayman, right onto the leg of Jessica Wrisley who smashed it into the net and gave the Red Hawks a comfortable 2-0 cushion.

“I didn’t like how I hit it at first,” Denkiewicz said of the corner kick. “I try to always curve it in, but it was too close to the goalie. But Jess Wrisley was there to put it in. Scoring goals off corners is always so nice.”

While the final was 2-0, it may well have been a lot worse if not for some tough saves from Hayman. Frontier consistently put pressure on her, but time after time, the Ware goalkeeper came up with difficult stops, finishing with nine of them in total.

Red Hawks coach Phil Pittelli felt his team played a strong game, but one area he is looking to improve is in the final third of the field with finishing. He was pleased to see multiple players outside of Denkiewicz get shots on net, however.

“She made some really good saves,” Pittelli said of Hayman. “I was surprised at some of them. She was fearless. There was at least two that we definitely should have put away, but we just mis-hit. We have to work on finishing, but we got the opportunities, which is encouraging. We got opportunities from other people, which was nice. It’s coming together in a short amount of time.”

Denkiewicz agreed the team needs to work on finishing, but understands it’s the first game and there is plenty of time to improve.

“She had a lot of one-on-ones that she stopped,” Denkiewicz said of Hayman. “We had a lot of breakaways that we couldn’t quite finish. We had a lot of shots but our shots aren’t really on right now which is normal when it’s the first game. Having this opportunity so early in the season, it’s nice to see what we are able to do.”

Defensively, Frontier was sharp from start to finish in picking up the shutout.

The Red Hawks allowed just nine shots on goal, with no free runs to the net. Freshman goalie Siomara Green wasn’t forced to make any overly-difficult saves, as the defense in front of her did a solid job of keeping the ball away from the box.

With it being a revamped defense this year, Pittelli liked what he saw from the young group.

“The defense was good, the second half was better,” he said. “We were able to control and organize a bit better. We communicated a lot more in the back. We have kind of a fairly new defense, some people are the same but we moved people around. I was wondering how it was going to go but they did well for that being the first game.”

With it being the Indians’ first season up in the North Division, Pittelli didn’t know what to expect out of them.

Ware finished 17-1-1 a season ago, going a perfect 12-0 in Pioneer South play. The impressive record earned them a bump up in division, where they are the new unknown.

“I was a little nervous because I knew they did really well last year, they were scoring a lot of goals and they were really pumped up,” Pittelli said. “I was looking for competition, and they’re good. They cramped us up a bit in the first half so we weren’t able to get those touches on the through balls that we wanted to. In the second half, we out-possessed them a lot more and we were connecting more. We were trying to get more touches which is why we were losing the ball.”

Denkiewicz thinks the Indians will stack up well in the North.

“The last time I played them was two or three years ago,” she said. “They’re a super physical team and they have a lot of heart, too. I think they’ll be good competition. That was a tough game, it wasn’t anything easy for us. Going into this game, we didn’t know what was going to happen. As it went on, we were confident in ourselves. It was definitely our game and we knew that.”