St. Joseph’s nips Airport in Crescent Cup girls soccer tournament

St. Joseph’s use its assertive offense to defeat host Airport 1-0 in its first game of the Crescent Cup girls soccer tournament on Friday.

“We’re a very young team; we’ve got a lot of freshmen, a lot of sophomores starting for us, and we’ve had ups and downs,” St. Joseph’s coach Rick Morris said.

“We were expecting good play, but we weren’t really expecting the kind of play we got today,” Morris said. “I’m proud of the way we played today. We possessed the ball well.”

The Eagles (7-4) had been on a seven-win streak, but with several key players injured, including senior Kayla Mansell, the squad was hampered on offense.

“We’ve got one that tore her ACL last week, who was our leading scorer, and it really takes a big punch out of our offense,” Airport coach Keith Morris said. “At a small school that’s not a soccer hotbed, when we lose two or three of our starters, it puts a hurting on us for this week and this tournament.”

Airport fought with St. Joseph’s through a scoreless first half, but the Knights were relentless in the second. St. Joseph’s (3-2) kept winning challenge balls, and kept getting a step on the Airport defense.

With 16:35 left, Agnes Stanton scored off a Knights’ corner kick assist.

The Eagles tried to respond, pushing into St. Josephs’ territory over the next few minutes. Their most potent attacks produced two shots on goal — one a St. Joseph’s save — in a three-minute span.

But the energized Knights swarmed to keep Airport from doing much after that.

“St. Joseph’s is a very good team, they really moved the ball around well, they capitalized on their one corner kick chance and that was a nice finish for them,” Keith Morris said. “They deserved to win.

“We’re working on things, we’re going to get through it, and we’re going to try to rebound from this loss,” he said.

The Crescent Cup, co-hosted by Airport and Brookland-Cayce, continues Saturday with matches beginning at 9 a.m. at both schools. Airport will play at 10:30 a.m., St. Joseph’s takes the field again at 1:30 p.m.

This story was originally published March 27, 2015 at 11:38 PM with the headline "St. Joseph’s nips Airport in Crescent Cup girls soccer tournament."