East Hampton/Pierson Girls Soccer Shuts Out Hampton Bays

The East Hampton/Pierson girls soccer team picked up its first victory of the season, 4-0, at home over Hampton Bays on Friday, September 9, and the Bonackers are hoping an early-season victory can propel them going forward.

East Hampton, which had lost its two first games of the season to Riverhead and Miller Place, respectively, played at Port Jefferson on Monday and hosted Center Moriches on Tuesday, both games Bonac head coach Cara Nelson thought were winnable for her team.

“I think it’s really great when you get a win early on in the season. The girls know what it’s like, it lights a fire under them, they want more of this,” she said. “The next few games we have good competition where we’re hoping we’re going to pull out some more wins.

“If the girls continue to play the soccer that [assistant coach Joseph DiGirolomo] and I want from them — where we’re looking for them to pick their heads up, move the ball, play wide, and just to win 50/50 balls, play together as a team — if they do all the right things I think they have a good future ahead of them,” Nelson continued. “We do have a lot of seniors that we’re graduating, but it’s nice to see it all come together when these girls have all worked really hard over the last few years, and to see the progress on the field with a win like this, it’s great.”

After peppering Hampton Bays goalie Brianna Farrell with shots for much of the first half, East Hampton finally broke through with a goal with 5:53 remaining when Claire McGovern found a racing Jocelyn Prieto, who beat her defender to the ball and basically found herself one-on-one with Farrell. Prieto went bottom left corner to beat Farrell and put her Bonackers on the board, 1-0, which was the score at halftime.

Nelson said Prieto is the team’s sweeper, but that she actually moved her up to center mid to try to kickstart the offense after multiple scoring chances went by the wayside or were stopped by Farrell.

“I moved her up out of sweeper, got her into the mix to see if she could make something happen offensively. She moved into the center mid role and she was able to score the first goal,” Nelson said of Prieto. “She’s got great composure. You can put her anywhere on the field. She is aggressive, she will go to every ball, she picks her head up, she distributes the ball beautifully, and getting her up at center mid we were able to net that first goal.”

Hailey Benenaula scored less than 4 minutes into the second half to give the Bonackers a 2-0 lead. Skye Tanzmann scored two goals within the game’s next 10 minutes to make up the final score. Viviana Guerrero made three saves in goal for East Hampton to record the shutout.

Hampton Bays, meanwhile, was coming off a dominant season-opening 6-0 nonleague victory at Stony Brook just two days prior on September 7. Assistant coach José Antonio Alarcón, who was filling in for head coach Andrew Seabury, who was visiting his native England, said one of the team’s top players, Esther Lopez, suffered an injury that game and did not make the trip to East Hampton. A few other players had family emergencies as well, and couldn’t make it, and when another player went down with an injury early on Friday, Alarcón said that left the Baymen shorthanded.

“First half they held themselves in there, and then I guess the second half the other team had a lot of subs, they had fresh legs,” he said. “We started running out of steam about 10 minutes into the second half.”

But Alarcón gave credit to the players on the field, saying that they battled admirably. He was most impressed with Farrell, who finished with 22 saves on the day, and Stephanie Caal, who was right there defending the goal with Farrell, sweeping away any would-be chances, especially in that first half.

“Brianna, oh my God, she [was] incredible,” Alarcón said. “Between her and Steph, they were the players of the match for Hampton Bays. Without her and Brianna, I believe it would have been a higher score.

“We have a lot of work to do,” he added. “We have to go back to basics. It seems some of our best players are down, and probably down for a while. We’re going to have to regroup and rethink our strategy for the next upcoming games.”

The Baymen played at Miller Place on Tuesday and are scheduled to host Southampton this Friday at 4:30 p.m.