KALONA

Defense was the name of the game in Hillcrest’s rainy home season opener against fellow conference member Burlington Notre Dame last Thursday, but in the second half it was the Nikes who finally broke the offensive drought. 

Scoring its first goal of the season while not relenting on defense, Burlington ND (1-1) earned a 1-0 victory over Hillcrest (0-1).

“I wish we had a different result, but overall, I was pleased with the effort. First half, we were right there with them,” Hillcrest head coach Marcus Miller said about playing against the Nikes. “Second half, I think they had the wind at their back, and maybe a little bit more control of it, but we created some chances. We tried a few different things.”

A physical game through and through, both teams attempted to match each other’s intensity on both sides of the ball and through the first half this led to the score being deadlocked at 0-0.

“Some years in the past, I don’t think we would have matched [Burlington ND] physicality. I thought we did tonight,” coach Miller said.

Hillcrest’s defense was stout but in the second half Burlington ND continuous attacks finally bore fruit. With 23 minutes left in the game, the Nikes gave themselves the lead with a goal from Alessandro Markomichelakis.

“We maybe got a little bit tired. The goal they got, we just didn’t step,” coach Miller said of Burkingtons ND’s second half goal.  “Our back line all day was doing a great job, and Mason Bender and Kale in the middle there defensively were doing well, but we didn’t step to the ball like we should have there.”

With no more goals coming in the game’s final 23 minutes, victory went to the Nikes as the Ravens were shut out of the scoring department.

“It was nice to see the energy. We tried a couple different things at the end, maybe we should have tried them sooner.” coach Miller said about Hillcrest’s offense. “That was a little bit of our issue last year, struggling to score consistently, and that’s one of the things we’ve been working on in practice. We’ll learn from this game, and hopefully it’ll make us better, and we’ll find ways to score.”

Up next for Hillcrest (0-1) is a home game against WACO (2-0) on April 10.