The Taft Thirds soccer team welcomed the Pride of Trinity-Pawling to our campus on a lovely fall afternoon to play a soccer match before an early sunset due to the recent time change. They arrived a little late so we got started late but managed to play the entire 80 minute match. Both teams came out a little slow and there was no scoring until the 35th minute when Riley Geurts playing his first minutes of the season assisted Jefferson Kao for a nice side-volley shot that beat the very-good T-P ‘keeper. Jeff then celebrated enthusiastically by running to our bench while jumping and hollering. Jack Dodd then made up for an earlier missed PK by knocking a nice low shot off the inside of the far post in the 39th minute. Jack has been shooting in this manner quite a bit lately including a nice goal v the Taft JV yesterday. It is a very effective means of scoring that I hope he continues to employ. The first half ended with Taft ahead two nil. In the second half, Andrew Jimenez took it upon himself to widen the lead a little bit and it is a good thing that he did, too. Jimmy made a good run forward in the 50th minute and scored a nice goal. Then in the 59th minute Oliver Eastman assisted Jimmy with a lovely diagonal pass that Andrew sent past the T-P ‘keeper to give Taft a four nil lead. Safe, right? Wrong. Suddenly a lot of the players in red were very interested in scoring their own goal and uninterested in playing defense. This allowed T-P to score two goals to get the score to four two. I sometimes wish that soccer included just one timeout for a coach to use. Most matches I would not use that timeout. Today was not one of those days. Fortunately Jack scored again in the 77th minute to get us up by three goals again and then the match was over soon after that. Carl Roux played well at center back and Kevin Jin played well in the center of the midfield. Most of our fellows played hard the entire time they were in but perhaps did not play intelligently. We will have to play better on Saturday v Hotchkiss when we end our season on Hotchkiss Day with an early 1:45 PM start. See you there!