Prep Soccer: New-look Lumberjills now 3-0 with win over Woodland

Jordan Nailon / Blast Zone Media

Alice’s Wonderland: Anderson nets hat trick for RAL in 5-2 victory

Last year the R.A. Long girls soccer team went on a historic run that included the school’s first ever win at the state tournament. With a senior laden roster, many observers assumed that achievement would serve as punctuation for a successful run on the pitch for the Lumberjills.

After losing so five starters in the offseason, it seemed foolhearty to ask a roster full of inexperienced varsity players to step right in and hit the ground running. 

But that’s just what R.A. Long has done thus far, and a 5-2 win over Woodland at Longview Memorial Stadium on Tuesday night showcased how they’ve managed to plug in and replace so effectively.

“Leadership, across the board, not just the seniors… everybody is dialed,” coach Max Anderson said after the league win.

Anderson, the head coach for R.A. Long boys soccer, was filling in for Taylor Wallace while the Lumberjills head coach was feeling down with the sickness. But Anderson has spent plenty of time around these Jills, and he’s not surprised in the least that they’re off to such a promising start. In fact, he says he first started to believe in the potential of this year’s team over the summer during an encouraging performance at the Lower Columbia College tournament.

Even more importantly, the new-look Lumberjills began believing in themselves.

“At that point we realized the dropoff may not be as severe as we’d feared with losing three-quarters of our spine,” coach Anderson said.

Beneath a mist of rain on an evening that foretold the impending arrival of true autumn, the Lumberjills and Beavers engaged in a standoff for the first 30 minutes of their 2A Greater St. Helens League contest. But in the 31st minute senior midfielder Alice Anderson put R.A. Long ahead with an arcing shot to the top left corner of the goal.

That score served to break the seal on the Woodland goal and just two minutes later it was Olivia Durrett who tickled the back of the net to give the Jills a 2-0 lead. Then, with halftime looming, Anderson followed up with her second score of the night in the 37th minute to give the hosts plenty of breathing room at the intermission.

“We went into the game trying to work better as a team connecting and I thought we did that,” Alice Anderson said. “We had some really good opportunities in those first 30 minutes, they just dtidn’t go in.”

As a nearly full moon rose higher in the night sky the seasonal drizzle only became more persistent, which presented problems for both sides. It was the the Lumberjills who felt the consequences of the slippery conditions first when Sofia Speranza took a pass from Addi Stading and looped a shot toward the R.A. Long goal from the numbers about 20 yards out. The ball came in high and skidded off the wet gloves of R.A. Long’s sophomore goalie, Autumn Beaton, for a slow motion goal that put the Beavers on the board in the 52nd minute.

“We’ve got to do some training in the rain with her,” coach Anderson said. “She’ll pretty much be the net-minder all year.”

Ten minutes later, though, R.A. Long’s Addison Hartley nullified that goal for the visitors after she received a pretty feed straight up the hashmarks and notched a point-blank goal over the hands of a lunging Brooklyn Haden between the pipes for the Beavers.

In the 68th minute Woodland cut the gap to just two scores, again, when Carly Coltrin gathered the rebound off a penalty kick by Stading and deposited it in the abandoned section of the net.

Just a few weeks into his first season as head coach of the Woodland girls team, Onesimo Sebastian already knows Stading and Esperanza will be at the heart of the Beavers operation this year.

“(Stading) has the trust of her teammates to give her the ball, just as much as Sofia Speranza,” Sebastian said. “With both of them in the middle it becomes a really good duo, a big threat where we can expose a side and continue on pressuring.”

That’s not to say that the Beavers will simply be putting their heads down and letting those two barrel up the field all season long. Instead, Woodland plans on incorporating a more cooperative attack through the middle.

“Bringing me in as a new coach definitley brings in a different atmosphere and a different way of playing with more passing and not so much driving down the line,” Sebastian said. 

That approach coudln’t stop Alice Anderson, though. In the 71st minute she was able to secure the hat trick by firing away from about 20 yards dirctly in front of the angled iron, sending a bender into the top right corner of the net for her thir goal of the evening.

And just like hat tricks, there’s nothing unfamiliar to Anderson about playing soccer under her father’s direction, as she did once for old time’s sake against the Beavers.

“It’s not too weird. A lot of us have played for him for a long time,” she noted.

And while Tuesday’s coaching scenario may have been a one-off scenario for the Jills, they’re hoping they’ll be able to sustain the success they’ve experienced on the pitch so far this season. If that’s going to happen, it will require continued excellence from the backline.

“We’ve got Amayah (Salas) and Elle (Jones) stepping up in the back in the center of the defense and they’ve been fantastic,” coach Anderson said. “It got a little shaky there in the second half, but they’re up for the task.”

Other newcomers to the Jills’ lineup are freshman wing Josie Sully and junior foreign exchange student, Laura Nikolajsen, straight out of Denmark.

So far, they’ve all been impressive in their varsity deployments.

“I’m really impressed by our defense… I know our team was concerned a lot about that going in, but they’ve definitley stepped up,” Alice Anderson noted. “Amayah (Salas) and Elle (Jones) are really killing it in the back. So is Sienna (Dorland), so is Madeleine (Smith). And then obviously Laura (Nokolajsen), our Danish girl, she’s pretty good.”

As for Woodland, the loss left it still searching for its first win of the young season. The Beavers will have to retool quickly to compete in a rough and tumble 2A GSHL schedule. Experts agree that the defending State champions from Ridgefield, along with Columbia River, will likely be the toast of the league, but the path to the playoffs could become complicated with parody dominating the middle of the pack.

“I’m not ready to say anybody’s got the direct line to third place. I think third through sixth is going to be pretty murky,” coach Anderson said, while naming Hockinson, Washougal, Mark Morris and Woodland as likely contenders for the final playoff spots.

But if the Beavers want to be in the conversation at the end of the regular season, they’ll quickly need to learn to deal with the elements that are most assuredly making their way toward Southwest Washington thanks to the turning of the calendar and the tilt of the earth.

“Tonight we had some trouble with the wet turf and R.A. Long is a very good team,” Sebastian added. “They play very well in their home games and they were hungry for it more than we were… This was definitley a good wake up call for the girls.”

Woodland (0-2-1, 0-2) will host Hockinson at 7 p.m. on Thursday.

R.A. Long (3-0, 1-0) will play as the visitors against Mark Morris on Thursday at 7 p.m. back at Longview Memorial Stadium.

Scoring Summary:

RAL - Alice Anderson goal (31’)

RAL - Olivia Durrett goal (33’)

RAL - Anderson goal (‘37)

WDL - Sofia Esperanza goal (52’)

RAL - Addison Hartley goal (62’)

WDL - Carly Coltrin goal (‘68)

RAL - Anderson goal (71’)