City High Snaps Skid With Win Over Dubuque Wahlert
Ryan Murken
Your Prep Sports
IOWA CITY – It had been two weeks since the City High girls soccer squad had celebrated a win.
18 days to be exact.
For the Little Hawks it may as well have been 180 days.
“It’s been a full two weeks and it’s been a rough
two weeks,” City High senior Ella Hennager said. “We didn’t even have a bunch of bad games, we just got unlucky a few times. It felt like forever.”The wait for a win finally came to an on Tuesday.
Hennager and Emma Seydel scored first-half goals as City High snapped a four-match losing skid with a 3-1 win over Dubuque Wahlert (1-8) in a Mississippi Valley Conference match at City High.
City High improved to 6-5 with the win, it’s first since a 4-0 victory over West High on April 20 and moved to 5-3 in MVC play.
Perhaps more importantly City High got some confidence back.
“It’s been a few weeks since we beat West, a few long weeks,” Seydel said. “It feels good. It was an eyeopener just to see that we are still a good team and we can still go a long way and get some momentum. I think we still have a lot in us.”
All four loses for City High during its 18-day winless stretch came by a single goal.
Last week the Little Hawks dropped a 2-1 overtime decision at Davenport North on Wednesday and fell to Class 3A eighth-ranked Linn-Mar 3-2 on Friday.
On Tuesday, City High scored more than two goals for the third time this season and first since its win over West High
“We had a good second half against Linn-Mar and it was can we use that second half to push us into this next set of game,” City High coach Prunty said. “We are always trying to get better but today it was the right game where we could kind of find ourselves again. It was good timing for this game for sure.”
Hennager gave City High a lead it would never give up with a first-half penalty kick.
Madelyn Fontana was fouled in the box and Hennager converted the ensuing penalty kick for her first goal of the season.
“I had never taken a pk in a game before and I so I was surprised that he picked me,” Hennager said. “I was waiting for him to say ‘just kidding, someone else is going to take it’ that didn’t happen and I just tried to be calm and make a good shot.”
Operating against a stiff wind in the opening half City High took a 2-0 lead when Seydel put away a Sydney DePrenger pass.
“I had another shot and it didn’t go in so it was just kind of a relief to get that goal,” Seydel said. “That made us feel like we were really in control.”
City High led 2-0 at the half and weathered an early second-half storm from Wahlert.
The Golden Eagles bounced a shot off each post in the opening four minutes of the second half but couldn’t get on the board.
City High put the match away when Elizabeth Peters scored with 2:38 left.
We got that goal and we could relax a little and we got the second one and we maybe relaxed a little too much,” Prunty said. “It was good to kind of be able to take a breath and play with a lead.”
Dubuque Wahlert got on the board on an Elizabeth Perry goal with 2:15 left.
City High returns to action on Friday at Dubuque Hempstead.“This helps us build some momentum,” Hennager said. “It’s really important as we go i
nto the end of the season and regionals to feel confident.”