Burnet girls soccer celebrates milestone

CAPTION: Brook Oliva hit a personal milestone as a Lady Dawg by scoring her 100th career goal against Lampasas Dec. 16. Courtesy photo

The Burnet High School girls soccer team entered the Christmas holiday with lots of cheer.

Brook Oliva led the way by scoring all six of the Lady Dawgs’ goals in a shutout of Lampasas Dec. 16. In doing so, she has 100 career goals scored as a Lady Dawg.

“I thought we played really well,” head coach Doug Ketcham said. “The six goals was pretty exciting for her. She’s a phenomenal athlete. She has a nose for the goal, obviously. She’s very intense. I think that helps her as well. That was enjoyable, but overall I thought we played really well.”

He noted only one of Oliva’s goals was one on one where she beat the goalie. The others were because the Lady Dawgs worked together as a team to find the back of the net thanks to their spacing.

“We made some passes to get there,” Ketcham said. “Obviously the girls were pretty motivated playing their former coach (new Lampasas head coach Kimberly Myhre-Burnside). So I think that played into it, too. That was a good outing for us for sure.”

He enjoyed watching the Lady Dawgs defend, noting the Lady Badgers had their chances. 

“We had a couple of instances where they had breakaways and we were able to not concede a goal, so that part was good,” the coach said. “We had the shutout – that was fantastic. They were a good team. I think next year it’s going to be a different game. (Myhre-Burnside) has some good talent over there. So I think it’ll be pretty good. And I don’t think the goals tell the whole story. I think it was closer than that, but we’ll take it.”  

The Burnet and Lampasas high school soccer programs faced off in a toy drive challenge to see which school could bring in the most donated toys. Burnet won for the second year. Toys are being donated to the Hill Country Advocacy Center.

“The toy drive was a real big success,” Ketcham said. “I think we collected more than 600 toys, and we dropped those off. And so I thought that was pretty special.” 

Burnet followed that scrimmage with another shutout, this one against San Angelo Lake View Dec. 19.

“Lake View was pretty good,” Ketcham said. “They were physical, which played a big role into it. It seemed like the girls kind of shut down just because of the physicality, which is something we have to work through.”

The coach said addressing that will be important for the rest of the season.

“I don’t think it’ll be the last time we see it,” he said. “If I was going to play against us, that would definitely be a tool I would use to put it in my game plan, just physicality. We had several starters not in, who didn’t play. So we’re missing a few, but we can’t make excuses. We just have to go out and play and score goals, and we didn’t do that.”

Ketcham noted the practice a day earlier wasn’t as crisp.

“When you don’t practice well, in my opinion, you don’t play well,” he said. “So we’re going to rectify that when we practice on (Dec.) 29th and play on the 30th.”

That’s when the Lady Dawgs travel to play at Lorena at 11 a.m.

“I want to see a performance closer to what we had (against Lampasas),” the coach said. “I think that’s kind of our standard, and we talked about that. Every time we go out, that should be our best game, so we should be improving every time. We kind of took a step back (against Lake View). (Lorena is) probably going to our best opponent to date. So we’re going to have to really step it up. They’re a really good program and they have a lot of quality.”   

CAPTION: Genesis Avila is careful to not use her hands as she gains control of the ball in the box. Photo by Martelle Luedecke