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- Val T.
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS
Sports Editor, RTC
Rochester girls soccer player Taylor Navara was “very” exhausted after her team’s home game against Logansport at the Brent Blacketor Memorial Sports Complex Tuesday.
But it was a happy kind of exhausted, and it started with all the water she drank hours before the game even started.
Navara scored a hat trick in the second half, and Alexandria Cortes-Gustafson stopped two shots in goal as the Lady Zs blanked Logansport 3-0.
Freshman Charlie Backus made the top defensive play, running down a Logansport player who appeared to be running down the middle for a one-on-one attempt on Gustafson with just over 29 minutes left and Rochester hanging onto a 1-0 lead and dispossessing her of the ball and kicking it aside.
The win is believed to be Rochester’s first ever win over Logansport in girls soccer. They played to a 1-1 draw last year.
The game was played in blazing conditions – temperatures in the mid-90s with the sun’s rays seemingly aimed down on the pitch. There was a water break at approximately the halfway point of each half.
Rochester coach Eric Backus emphasized drinking water long before the game even starts, given the forecast.
Navara was the only player to succeed through the heat.
She scored on a high floating shot from the right flank that bounced over the Logansport goalkeeper’s head with 38:08 left.
“I feel like being agile at top is really important because you can shoot from afar,” Navara said. “That shot was very unexpected out of me, and I feel like I kind of closed my eyes and wished for the best.”
Navara, a senior midfielder, typically runs down the right side in Rochester’s offense. Her first goal was something of an accident after a missed opportunity earlier.
“My big thing at the beginning of the game was if you’re going to drive it deep into the box, look for your cross,” coach Backus said. “And the first time she did it, she played an amazing cross, and we had nobody there, and I was like, ‘Oh, that was the one.’ … The first goal she scored, she was actually trying to cross, but she played it right over the keeper’s head into the corner. We’ll take it. It kind of got us going.”
Then she scored an unassisted goal on a run down the middle and scored in the back left corner with 22:52 left.
“My second goal, I feel like was based on a lot of luck,” Navara said. “Just throughout the defense, and I feel like I was in the right spot at the right time, but I don’t think I could have done it without my teammates for sure.”
Her third goal came on a penalty kick after a teammate was fouled inside the box with 8:29 left.
“Never, honestly,” Navara said when asked how often she practices PKs.
Navara was asked about the weather.
“It’s terrible,” Navara said. “You’ve got to drink a lot of water. You’ve got to prepare. From the moment you wake up, you’ve got to start drinking water. You’ve got to prepare yourself.”
Coach Backus said he rotated players in frequently. Even seniors like Navara and Bria Rensberger, players who rarely get a break, got frequent breaks in order to stay hydrated.
“Don’t freak out if you don’t start because we’re just going to rotate a lot,” Backus said. “So we’re going to try to wear them out. We’ve got great subs. We can run, and we can be high effort. I think a little bit of the heat set in because we’d put them in for about four minutes, and it looked great, and then we’d stop thinking and stop communicating. So I just told them at half the first touch has got to be a settling touch. And then we’d go do something with the ball, right? And they all agreed. I told them even if you’re tired, you have to stay in communicating with each other because that’s how we were moving the ball.”
Rochester is 2-3. They were shut out in their first two games but have scored nine goals in their last three games.
“We should have one loss right now to be honest with you,” Backus said. “All of our kicks that we have generated on our offense have gone right to the keeper. In the first half, we did the same thing. We had three or four, and we kicked them right at her. It was nice to actually get a couple on the board that the keeper never even got to touch that went into the back of the net.
“To get Taylor rolling like this, this is huge for our team. She played a great game tonight. I thought all the girls played really, really well.”
