Last year Lafayette girls soccer team took the Bay River District by storm by ending the season with a record of 12-4-0. Their strong defensive line was the key to having multiple shutouts throughout the season. The overall 12 wins were help to the two leading goal scorer for the year, Carson Pokorny and Hannah Potter.

“Throughout the past four years I’ve been on the team, we’ve seen a lot of good players and coaches go.” Says senior captain, Emma Shenk. This is proven to be true as this year the rams have a completely different team as they lost 15 players as well as their head coach, Kevin Nealer. This left them with only 5 returning players and an assistant coach. Over the winter, Mr. Barner and some of the returning players worked to find the new perfect head coach. With limited options, they took a shot in the dark and picked an ex-professional player, Derek D’arcy. He made it clear from the beginning that he had never coached an all-girls high school soccer team.  Soon the girls found that he wasn’t working out as well as hoped and started to butt heads with the new coach for many reasons. At the early date of April 28th, after 4 games, D’arcy resigned as head coach leaving the team in the hands of two year assistant coach Michelle McClellen. While the team was in the hands of D’arcy they were 1-3. After two bad loses, D’arcy shut out the entire team instead of dealing with the problems at hand. Under McClellen’s coaching, the rams boosted their record to 5-4.

Although the rams have lost coaches and players, they still have very high hopes for the rest of the season. They believe they can pull out a few more wins with their strong forward and midfield led by freshman Bailey Gentry and Taylor Gubler. The leader of the back defensive line throughout the season has been Emma Shenk. She has been trying to teach the new rams how to be as strong as their previous back line. In the middle of the season, they’re not as strong has they have been in the past but they have improved since the beginning of the season.

The rams won against Heritage High last friday night in double over time golden goal. The game winning goal was scored by Sophomore midfielder, Illiana Tue. This pushes the rams into their second conference match against Smithfield tonight at Smithfield. The winner of this game will continue to play the winner of the Grafton vs. Jamestown game taking place later this week.