JOHNSTOWN — Though her team put three goals on the board in the first half, Johnstown field hockey coach Christine Krempa was less than pleased with what she saw.
“Even though we scored three goals, the first half was not our best half of field hockey. We weren’t doing much right in the first half,” she said. “We weren’t making nice passes and we weren’t putting hard shots on the cage. We looked like we were lost a little bit, and we want to be the team causing the chaos and making the other team scramble.”
At the half, Krempa let her team know it needed to pick up its play.
It worked, as the Lady Bills scored three times in the third quarter on their way to a 7-0 Foothills Council victory over Glens Falls at Knox Field.
“We had a bit of a talk at halftime about what we needed to be doing and we started to play Johnstown field hockey in the second half,” coach Krempa said. “We started to get back to basics in the second half, and it paid off for us.”
Johnstown got goals from six different players and held a 14-2 advantage in penalty corners, scoring on several of them.
Ava Barker led the Lady Bills with two goals, while Ayaka Sasaki had a goal and an assist. Jenna Barker, Nicole Simon, Cole Krempa and Caroline Krempa also scored, while Bella Bermas had two assists.
Ava Barker scored the lone goal of the first quarter to open the scoring with 2:37 left, putting home a pass from Sasaki to make it 1-0.
Sasaki scored just 4:04 into the second quarter to make it 2-0 before Ava Barker scored her second of the first half with 8:16 remaining to make it 3-0 at the break.
In the second half, Johnstown got out of the gates quickly when Jena Barker scored on an assist from Bermas on a penalty corner just 59 seconds into the third quarter.
“We did a nice job on corners today,” Krempa said. “We’ve been working on our second and third attempts in practice. We’ve just got to be more scrappy, and want to put the ball in the cage.”
Simons made it 5-0 with 9:37 left in the third quarter when she poked home a rebound before Cole Krempa score to push the Lady Bills’ lead to 6-0 with 7:58 left in the frame.
Johnstown scored its final goal of the game on a penalty corner with 2:56 to play when Caroline Krempa scored on an assist from Bermas.
Emilia Haverly didn’t need to make a save to post the shutout in goal for Johnstown. It was the third shutout of the season for the Lady Bills, who outshot the Indians by a 26-1 margin.
Maggie Goodwin finished with 11 saves for Glens Falls, which is fielding a roster that features no seniors and just two juniors. The rest of the lineup is made up of freshmen and sophomores.
“We have a very young team,” Glens Falls coach Michele Venditto said. “We’re coming up and playing at a higher level. It’s tough because we haven’t been able get kids to spend a lot of time playing in the offseason the last few years, so we have to try to play catch-up during the season.”
Johnstown (5-2 overall, 3-2 Foothills) is scheduled to host Section III’s Holland Patent in a non-league game Saturday at Knox Field at 11 a.m.
Glens Falls (1-3 overall, 1-3 Foothills) is scheduled to host Queensbury today at 4:30 p.m.
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