Marble Falls girls soccer ties Davenport

CAPTION: Senior captain Dulce Macias scores the all-important final goal to ensure a tie with San Antonio Davenport. Photo by Ernesto Rivera

The Marble Falls High School girls soccer team secured a 1-1 tie against San Antonio Davenport Feb. 6 in District 26-4A play.

The Lady Mustangs (8-2-3, 0-2-1) scored the equalizer thanks to senior captain Dulce Macias, who found the back of the net from around 20 yards out win with about two minutes remaining in the contest.

The outcome snapped a two-game losing skid and while a tie may not sound impactful, head coach Marisa Miller explained its significance.

“A tie gives us a point in the point system,” she said. “I think also just mentally it helped us bounce back from our (New Braunfels) Long Creek game.”

Macias’ goal came on a throw-in when the ball hit a Lady Wolf.

“It went straight to her, and she took the opportunity,” Miller said. “She was on the outside of the box. She’s been a huge factor in our offense this year, and she’s scored a lot of big goals for us. We put a lot of trust in her. We were playing pretty well defensively, and I told her she probably wouldn’t get as many opportunities up top. She took that challenge and was able to go ahead and put in the opportunity that she had.”

The coach said the Lady Mustangs have “been practicing that a lot.”

“We’ve been changing up different styles of shooting and different styles of attacking,” she said. “We were really concentrating on shooting further outside the box and just putting more shots on goal, not waiting for the perfect opportunity, and so it was great to see her take that shot. It was a long-range shot and just adding that to our offense.”

The Lady Wolves scored their goal in the first 2 minutes of the contest. Miller, who credited sophomores Savannah York and Jill Cole for anchoring that side of the field, pointed out the Lady Mustangs had two new defenders starting because illness and injuries.

“That was their first game playing together,” she said of the defensive players. “We knew it might be a little shaky in the beginning, but they did a great job recovering from that first goal and communicating in the back. We had talked about that Davenport is known to score goals, but we have to learn from it and we have to get ready and communicate back there.”

The 2-0 loss against Long Creek happened Jan. 30 where the Lady Dragons scored in the final four minutes of the match. That outcome came on the heels of losing to the state’s No. 1 team, Wimberley, 1-0 when the Lady Texans scored on a ricochet in the first half.

Marble Falls exited the pitch against Wimberley encouraged and had a different feeling when leaving the field against Long Creek (6-2-2, 2-1).

But after the contest against Davenport (10-2-1, 2-1-1), the Lady Mustangs felt much of the same way as they did against the Lady Texans (12-1-1, 4-0), Miller said.

Soccer uses a point system that determines playoff berths. Wins give the victors three points, ties yield a point for each squad, and a loss nets zero points to the loser. Miller believes points will determine who advances and who doesn’t because of the parity in the district as illustrated by four members ranked in the top 20 in the state.

Therefore losses to district members that won’t advance typically have a detrimental effect because those three points are going to a squad that may not win another contest against one of the state-ranked teams.

“Every single game is going to matter because it’s going to come down to a close amount of points, and then Long Creek had lost to Davenport, and so us tying gives us another point ahead,” Miller said. “And so when it comes down to the end, when it’s going to be really close, every point matters. That one point could help us have an edge over some of the other teams.”

Marble Falls travels to Fredericksburg (6-7, 1-3) Tuesday, Feb. 10 with the junior varsity playing at 5 p.m. and the varsity at 7 p.m. The Lady Billies lost to Long Creek 3-1 Feb. 6.