Seymour’s David Polbito lines up to take a penalty kick for the Owls on Thursday against New Albany. Polbito would provide the assist on the play to Evan Unterseher who scored on the exchange.
New Albany’s boys soccer team attempted 14 shots to Seymour’s five, but the Bulldogs did not have Evan Unterseher for Thursday night’s Hoosier Hills Conference contest.
The Seymour sophomore scored two goals in the first half to spark the Owls to a 2-0 victory at home.
While Owls coach Matt Dennis said Unterseher did a good job of scoring, he said a lot of the credit goes to the defense as his team improved to 2-1 in the HHC.
“When you get a shutout like that, that’s not just the backs, that’s not just the keeper. That was all the guys on the same page defending well,” he said. “We got a couple of good goals. One was against a running play, I thought. All night, we had a good balance of trying to get our chances but never selling out to the point where we gave up anything cheap.”
Dennis continued speaking on the game for Seymour.
“I thought the boys recovered well from the fronts. They started playing defense for us,” he said. “The mids were able to cover the front that second half. We were clogging the middle pretty well. They settled for distance shots from 25, 30 yards. I’ll let them have those all day long. Our guys were clogging the middle and doing a good job.”
David Polbito had a free kick at the 13:50 mark of the first half. His shot was stopped by Bulldog goalie Zach Fleming, who was unable to hold onto the ball, and it bounced to Unterseher who scored for a 1-0 lead.
“(Polbito) told me before the free kick to crash, and I knew I was going to get it if he missed or if it bounced off the keeper. It came right to me,” Unterseher said.
Unterseher’s second goal came with 4:42 left in the half.
“On the second goal, there was a little mixup in the box, and Kayden (Cox) headed it down and Thai (Daraswad) and I were next to each other, and I flicked it out and turned and fired one past the keeper,” he said.
Unterseher also praised the defense.
“I think our defense was really good,” he said. “They were jamming us down in the second half, but we held our own. We kept them out, and I think the main thing about this defense this year is Logan (Westfall) is really talkative. He and Lance (Hubbard) keep communicating, and we’re just physical.”
Hubbard was in goal for the Owls and was credited with 11 saves.
Dennis said this was Seymour’s fourth shutout of the season.
“We like to defend. You get the goal and you’re able to defend, and that’s a win every day,” he said. “It was a really good defensive effort. It was a really good attacking effort. We had good patterns of play going forward. We had good strings of passes where we were able to put together seven, eight times, and tried to work the ball to the sidelines, and we got ourselves into some dangerous chances. The difference today is that we were able to finish those chances, so that’s always good.”
The Owls (3-4-1) will host Oldenburg Academy at noon Saturday. The game was originally scheduled to take place at 7 p.m but will now be played at the new time.