TUMWATER — The Tumwater soccer team’s nightmare continued for a half hour Thursday at home. But after 30 minutes of knocking on the door, the Thunderbirds finally broke through, ending their roughest stretch of the season when they absolutely needed to and rolling to a 4-1 win over Aberdeen in a loser-out matchup at the 2A District 4 Tournament.
“We needed it,” head coach Brett Bartlett said. “We were still a little bit flat, but we’re getting around it.”
Forty-eight hours removed from a shocker against Hockinson, in which the Thunderbirds outshot the Hawks 22-3 and lost 1-0, the Tumwater offense continued to do just about everything except put the ball in the back of the net.
For the better part of a half, the field at Tumwater District Stadium was tilted entirely in the hosts’ favor, but a barrage of crosses yielded few shots on target, and fewer real opportunities.
“It was similar, and they just had to work through it,” Bartlett said. “They’ve got to believe and keep building it. Instead of trying to force it, keep building it, building it, building it.”
Finally, in the 37th minute, the hammer blow fell, when Emalyn Shaffer pounced on a spilled save by the Aberdeen keeper and buried it from inside the 6-yard box.
“But to get the one before halftime was important, just for them to kind of be like, ‘Okay, breathe and play,’” Bartlett said. “That was good, we needed to do that.”
The goal didn’t exactly open the floodgates for Tumwater. But coming out of halftime, it didn’t take long for Shaffer to find her second, doubling the lead in the 46th minute.
Kayla Pope extended the lead to 3-0 in the 67th minute, finally getting the Thunderbirds a goal directly from a cross, and four minutes after that she got her second from the penalty spot when Kennedy Riedl drew a foul inside the penalty area.
Now, the Thunderbirds are a win away from a return to the state tournament, rebounding from their toughest outing of the fall. As it happens, though, they’ll get an unexpectedly big task to get there. With R.A. Long upsetting No. 1 Columbia River in the semifinals, the Thunderbirds will have to get through the Rapids — the last team to beat them prior to the Hockinson loss — on Saturday in a loser-out, winner-to-state matchup.
“They approached it well,” Bartlett said. “It’s better to take the loss early than like last year where you go all the way through and you have your off-game in the state semifinals… The hope is that this is the one we go and build from, and get things rolling again, because they were rolling really well for awhile and then we didn’t take care of business like we had in the past.”
