Lions Wear-Down Hawks, Get Another Shutout

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Coach Brink

On Thursday, the Lions traveled to Prairie, to what would become a wet and cold double-header. Just about the time the Fresh-Soph team kicked off, the rains become…light and off and on for the majority of the night, but enough to potentially cause a few problems for players.
The Young Lions came into the game after winning their first four games 1-0, but the Lions (nor the Hawks) could put the ball past the keepers…and so the teams tied 0-0 (neither Fresh-Soph nor JV play overtime).
The Varsity teams faced off late and after a scoreless first half, where both teams had a couple of chances, 0-0 thru the first half, both teams with chances Jordan Webb collected a turnover deep in the Prairie half and in front of the LM bench. Webb turned away from goal and played a cheeky back heel down the line to Brian Allsup, who crosses the ball into the 18 and found the head of striker, Leroy Enzugusi (57th minute)
Prairie began to press more players forward, in an attempt to tie the game, but the defense proved to be too much for the Hawks. As time ran down, Blake Comstock cleared the ball high and long, and as it came Dow , it skipped off the last defender before being collected by Daniel Luzindya. Daniel beat the defender, dribbled at the goalie, faked to his left, and after the keeper fell, Daniel scored with his right to put the game away (78th minute). The 2-0 win was the 7th Shutout for goalkeeper Jared Belin who had 10 saves on the night. The team elected Belin as the Man of the Match for his ability to command the box, and eliminate any and all attempts that came his way.
The team is now 9-1 with a chance to get their 10th against Wash at home on Thursday night.

Schmidt’s Summary

Posted on April 27, 2014 by Coach Schmidt

Week 6: April 21^st to 27^th

It’s hard to believe we’ve been at this for a month and a half now. We are also heading into our last month of practice and games. But in this second half we have the bulk of our games still to come.

Looking at this past week the team had three practices and two games. In practice we focused again on possession and passing as the main points but have shifted to a little more transition focus. As we try to work on moving the ball with our passing we’d like to end those passing strings with the ball in the back of the opponents net, kind of a way to stamp a period on our hard work to get the ball from one end to the other. To help us accomplish this task almost all of our passing sequence drills have been converted over to finishing drills. The hope here is that the players don’t stop with their passing simply because we are in front of the goal. We’ve also kept them at a bit further rang in hopes that they pull the trigger instead of trying to get to close. I felt that this worked in terms of scoring chances (17 shots in our first two games, 29 shots in our second two games), it just didn’t result in more goals. Now it seems some fine tuning is needed in order to produce more goals.

We will continue to focus on passing and possession as it is a major part of the game, plus we really only need to score more than once if we happen to allow our opponents to score any number of goals. With that, we’ve played four games, scored four goals, and allowed zero goals against. A great start to the season, but there are still a lot of games to go and we’ll have to continue our great efforts if we want to maintain the favorable outcomes we’ve had. This week we had matches against two of the three Dubuque teams we play, the first of the week being on the road and the second on home turf.

The away game saw us matched up against Dubuque Wahlert, a team that seems to give us a little trouble each year especially when we travel to their field. Perhaps this is due to the limited space to warm up, maybe it’s the long bus ride, either way it seems there is something happening when we play this school. This was not the case this year as we easily kept the lead in all aspects of this match, shooting 14 v 3, passing 56% complete vs 22%, passing strings of 5 or more passes 8 vs 0. So, you can see we really came to play in this match.

The second match was much of the same and although Hempstead put up a good fight for most of the match our players persevered and came out on top. This game looking at our stats we again lead the whole time: 15 to 6 on shots, 55% pass completion to 35%, 14 passing strings of 5 or more to just 2.

Hopefully we can continue to play like this throughout the year and if you’d like to see more of our stats or further breakdown of each game please head over to our 2014 Game Schedule as I’ve been uploading the stat file there.

Upcoming Games
Fresh/Soph and Varsity:
4-29 @ CR Prairie (F/S 4:15, V 6:45)
5-4 vs CR Wash (F/S 5:15, V 7)
JV:
4-28 vs IC West 5:45
5-2 @ CR Xavier 5:45

Go Lions!

Coach Schmidt

Lions Return Home, Beat Mustangs

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Coach Brink

Thursday night, the Lions returned home to take on their second Dubuque opponent in as many days, hosting the Hempstead Mustangs. Both teams came into the game with one loss, and both coming at the hands/feet of the Kennedy Cougars.
Linn-Mar established good possession and pressure early against the Mustangs and that lead to early scoring opportunities. Despite the chances, it took until the Lions got an early gift as the Mustang goalkeeper stepped over the 18yd box with the ball still in his hands. Hunter Wong took the free kick and gave the Lions the 1-0 lead in the 20th minute. The Lions continued to play well despite not converting on any more chances…until the 62nd minute when Ben Johnson was the recipient of some quick 1-touch passing, namely from Devin Eby, then Blake Comstock. The Mustangs had some good looks at goal, many of which were from distance, but goalkeeper Jared Belin was determined not to allow them to make a comeback; he collected his 6th shutout of the season, and team’s 7th of the season. Wong was named Man of the Match for his first half efforts to shut down the Mustang offense, ability to control play, and especially for his game-winning goal.

The Fresh-Soph team also won, and are now 4-0 on four 1-0 victories.

Week 6: April 21st to 27th

Go Lions!

Week 6: April 21^st to 27^th