The Plymouth State Men’s soccer team tied the Rhode Island College Anchormen in a LEC matchup this past Sat., Oct. 18 in a showdown in Providence.
PSU goalie Tyler Shute made an impressive 15 saves in a very impressive outing on net. While on the other end, RIC goalie Justin O’Connor made two saves and kept his record of shutouts in non-conference games going. While both offenses threatened many times, neither team could find the back of the net. Coach Wright had many praises to hand out for his goalkeeper, “Tyler Shute had a great game in goal, making two spectacular saves, and Drew McSpiritt had a great game as well, stepping in for Cole Joy just before kickoff.”
After a tough loss to defending national champion Middlebury College, Coach Wright had to get his players in a specific mindset for the game, “The guys were very upbeat after the Middlebury game despite the loss. We conceded goals in that game that were just due to their physical size advantage so we took a lot of positives from the result. We needed a result of some kind at RIC (win / draw) so we had to be sure to defend extremely well. We lost Cole Joy to injury before the game, and George Delano (20 minutes in) and Tommy Schrey (about 50 minutes in) picked up injuries as well, so our preparations were severely disrupted early on. The field there is extremely small and bumpy. We had to play into a strong head wind for the first half, so the guys did extremely well to deal with everything,” said Wright in an email.
With upcoming games against a very tough Castleton State team who is 9-7, and Umass Boston, who is having a rough season at 4-10, PSU still has a tough challenge ahead of them. When Coach Wright was asked about the end stretch of the season, he had this to say, Castleton will be a tough game. We will certainly rotate the squad a little to make sure our injured guys are available for the two important conference games against UMass Dartmouth and UMass Boston.
With only a few games left in the season, Coach Wright still feels there are some things that the squad needs to work on as it approaches the LEC Tournament, Defensively, we have really sharpened up in recent games, so our focus has to be on taking our chances at the other end. Against RIC, we had the best chance for either team in the game but didn’t finish.
Coach Wright was also very willing to compliment the hard work of some of his players, “Our leadership has been exceptional this season. Captain Corey Cenate has had his best season, and Captains Seth Desjardins (torn ACL) and Gareth Stephens (separated shoulder) have been fantastic despite having to deal with severe injuries of their own. Semir Mehmedovic has done very well in his comeback year (Semir was involved in a very serious construction accident 13 months ago) and has now cracked the top 10 in two of our ‘All Time’ categories (career points / career assists) in what is only his third year. Because of our early injures, we have also seen our freshman class play a lot and certainly Dre Cabral, Alex Martins, KC Haywood, and Dimitrios Kapotis have all done very well,” said Wright.