With eight games remaining in the ThunderWolves 2015 season, the CSU-Pueblo Men’s Soccer team will seek to finish the season strong with the hopes of qualifying for the 2015 Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Tournament.
The Pack started the season off hot, winning each of its first three games with a combined score of 6-2. The next seven games, however, yielded a team record of 2-5, including a 1-3 record in the RMAC and bringing the teams total to 5-5 through the first 10 games.
Head coach Roy Stanley commended his team for their defensive play over the first half of the season, but identified an inability to finish as the main issue to improve upon in the coming weeks.
“I think that we have been playing solid on defense,” Stanley said. “We’ve been doing fairly well with getting out of the back and getting into the attacking half of the field so our possession play I think has been fairly solid. The biggest thing is just to do better with our opportunities in the attacking half.”
The Pack will continue to lean on its core group of seniors to find success throughout the back stretch of the season, led by senior forward and midfielder Matt Marchena who currently leads the team with 10 goals.
“I’ve got six seniors who have started every game and have played at least 70-90 minutes in those games who are shouldering most of the load,” Stanley said.
That senior leadership will be pivotal as the Pack now approaches the most critical part of its schedule, with each of its next six games being played against conference opponents.
“We need 100 percent. We’ve got our conference lives on the line,” Stanley said.
“We stubbed our toe in the Mines game but for everything else we’ve shown up. We just want to get ourselves back up to .500. In the past .500 has got you in the conference tournament.”
Getting to that .500 mark in the RMAC will require some big wins for the Pack over the coming weeks against conference foes, which Stanley believes are attainable for the ThunderWolves.
“I truly believe this team has better in it than the bottom 3 but we’ve got to get into that fourth, fifth, or sixth spot to get into the conference tournament. They (these conference games) come at a good time and we’re putting more of the pieces together now than we did at the beginning of the year. Every weekend is gonna be critical, there’s no doubt,” Stanley said.
