Phoenix and Reds battle to draw
Two boys high school soccer teams with lofty goals battled to a 1-1 draw Monday afternoon at Kiwanis Field.
Scoring for the Saint Francis Phoenix was Jaden Flora while Alex Gonzalez replied for the Denis Morris Reds.
Saint Francis came into the game after winning the AA division of the Niagara Cup last week.
“What makes us good is how close we are in school and on the field,” Saint Francis keeper and captain Nolan Freel said. “Every time you see a guy in the hall you are talking to him and letting him know that they are part of the team.”
Saint Francis head coach Patrick Morris agrees with that assessment.
“Everyone is really good friends and they all get along from Grade 9 all the way to Grade 12. They look out for each other and they take care of each other,” he said. “Standing outside watching them get together, they are like brothers and it is a special thing to watch. It has really come together and we had a big win in a tournament.”
Camaraderie is only part of the Phoenix’s makeup.
“We have a pretty young team and last year a lot of the star players were in Grade 10. Our intent was to build towards this season and hopefully next season,” Morris said. “Our big game players are now in Grade 11 but the whole team is a really tight group.”
The squad has big goals in mind.
“Our expectation coming into the season is that we expect to go to OFSAA (Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations) and that’s a tough thing but there is the talent on this team to do it. It is just a matter of putting that talent into production,” he said.
That OFSAA goal is also on the mind of Freel and his teammates.
“We have the talent, we have the potential and it is just coming together and beating the top teams,” he said.
Morris knows it won’t be easy.
“We have a tough group. The double A group in the Niagara Catholic zone is tough. We have Holy Cross which is leading the table right now and they’re full of stars. We played Saint Paul and didn’t have our best game but you know what you are getting when you play them. It is one of the best teams in the province for a reason.”
Freel will play a big role for the Phoenix this season.
“He is the captain of our team and really leads by example,” Morris said. “He is a big team guy and he gets in front of everything and the kind of guy who is a coach’s dream. You tell him what you expect the team to do and he makes sure that everybody is doing it, everyone has what they need such as rides and he takes care of everything like that.”
The Reds are also build to succeed.
“We have a lot of veteran guys out there and they know what their goals and objectives are. The Grade 12s do a good job of encouraging the younger guys,” Denis Morris head coach Conner Fusarelli said. “At the beginning of the season after the tryouts, we had a talk with them and we asked them what they wanted to accomplish. They said that they wanted to go for OFSAA this year so we are trying to get better every single game and we are trying to make positive efforts going forward so we can make the leaps and bounds.”
The Reds went 1-2 in last week’s Niagara Cup with the losses coming to the eventual tournament champion, St. John Henry Newman) and Notre Dame in a shootout after the game ended 0-0 in regulation.
“That (Newman) game was probably our best game of the year,” Fusarelli said.
So far in NCAA league play, the Reds are now 1-2-1.
