GREENVILLE – Greenville scored its first goal in more than a month, but it wasn’t enough as the Lady Wave lost 4-1 to Piqua in a Greater Western Ohio Conference girls soccer game on Thursday.
The Lady Wave have shown a lot of improvement throughout the season, first-year head coach Jason Arnold said, but they still have areas to improve as Thursday showed.
“I think they’re playing very well,” Coach Arnold said. “We’ve come a long way this season with our strategy and our technique. It’s just still get a sloppy when we get tired.”
Greenville scored first in the game against Piqua on a free kick goal by senior captain Alexandra Davidson with 25:13 remaining in the first half. The goal was just the second of the year for Greenville and the first since senior captain Kayla Arnold scored on Sept. 3 at Franklin Monroe.
“We were very pleased,” Coach Arnold said of Davidson’s goal. “It was a nice shot. We was hoping we could get about three more of those.”
For the first time this season Greenville had a lead – a lead it held until the final minute of the opening half when Piqua’s Hailey McPherson to tie the game at 1-1.
Piqua took its first lead of the night less than three minutes into the second half with Grace Jennings scoring to put the visitors up 2-1.
Eleven minutes later Piqua got an insurance goal from Shayna Bragg to make it 3-1. Then with just over nine minutes remaining in the contest Piqua scored the night’s last goal with Madison Curtner making it a 4-1 final score.
“It was just a matter of conditioning, getting back up and playing tough in the game,” Coach Arnold said of Piqua scoring three second half goals. “We got tired and kind of lost our shape and our tactics.”
With Thursday’s loss Greenville fell to 0-11 overall and 0-7 in the GWOC while Piqua improved to 4-8-1 overall and 3-4-1 in the conference.
Greenville will return to action on Saturday as the Lady Wave celebrate their senior night and play host to Springfield at 4 p.m.
