The Park City girls soccer team welcomed its new region with a victory over Highland in its first region match of the season on Aug. 17, but it’s been tough sledding for the Miners ever since.
Coach Tom Merchant’s team then faced Skyline and Olympus, two of the top three teams in Region 6, in its last two games and was outscored 9-0 in two losses. Park City was 1-6 on the season heading into its matchup against Murray on Tuesday.
“Oh, it’s a tough region, we knew that going in,” Merchant said. “If I’m looking at the schedule now and seeing the games that have been played, we’re playing it from the hardest teams toward the easier teams at the end of the rotation, so that’s a tough way to go into it, but that’s reality.
“I think it’ll make us better as players and as a team, whether it makes us as good as the top teams, we’ll have to wait and see until the next time around.”
The schedule does thin out for the Miners after facing second-place Murray (6-2, 3-1 in region) with three straight road games at Brighton (4-3, 0-3), East (5-2, 2-1) and Highland (2-6, 0-4).
After a 5-0 loss to undefeated Skyline on Aug. 20, Park City hosted Olympus last week and hung tough with the Titans for most of the game. The Miners only trailed by one at halftime, and some late goals in the second half made the score look worse than it actually was.
“We played about three-quarters of a very good game,” Merchant said. “We let up an early goal that was unfortunate, but really we didn’t lose heart and kept fighting from that. I think for three-quarters of the game, we looked reasonable, if not good or at least improving. And then, as it got to the end, we tended to lose our focus.”
Moving forward, the focus for Park City is finding a way to put the ball in the back of the net. The Miners’ only goal of the season in regulation came in the win against Highland. Merchant has liked what he’s seen from his defense but admits that the offense has plenty of work to do.
“I’d like for us to start scoring some goals, I think we’ll start feeling better about ourselves when we get to that point,” Merchant said. “Even though the scores have been ugly, our defense hasn’t been the problem, I don’t think. It’s more (creating) a solid attack.”
Merchant is working on getting his team to concentrate on smaller achievements and working out one objective at a time. He’s hoping that the Miners can use that strategy to improve from day to day and from game to game.
“But working on smaller goals rather than just ‘Let’s win the state championship,’ we need to work on day-to-day ‘Can we do this better?'” Merchant said. “And if we do, then let’s feel good about what we have improved on and then add another piece to it so that the end product is what we want.”