Hellgate girls soccer: a year's worth of difference
On an October Tuesday in 2012, on a rain-soaked and muddy Playfair Park field, the Missoula Sentinel girls’ soccer team brushed away its punchless challenger, Missoula Hellgate, 2-0.
The Spartans earned a spot at the State AA Soccer Tournament by handing the Knights one last defeat. Hellgate fell to a winless 0-10-2.
Well, what a difference a year makes. Continue reading
Homegrown Eagles leading this soccer bunch
A year ago, no Big Sky soccer player broke the double-digit mark for goals scored. The Eagles’ closest shot came from Miguel Gutierrez, a foreign exchange student who scored nine times and added two assists for the state-bound Missoula squad.
Big Sky took some grief from others around the state for having its best goal scorer be a foreign exchange player. Gutierrez’s play seemed like a free-agent pickup and the critics let coach Jay Bostrom hear about it — so much so that for the first few games at the beginning of this season, Bostrom made sure to note in conversations with the Missoulian that none of his goal scorers were exchange students. Continue reading
Revisiting Stevensville's long-awaited triumph at Whitefish
Two weeks ago we saw the battle of the regular season in Class A soccer up in Whitefish, a potential state title game preview.
Whitefish was undefeated. Stevensville was undefeated. The spectators were salivating.
But this big juicy steak turned out to be a little tough once you got into it. Stevensville scored four times in the second half to run away with a 5-2 match, the first loss for the Bulldogs in 33 matches. Continue reading
LSH Rams off and running despite late start
It was one of the most anticipated games of the opening week of Class B football contests. And it never even happened.
But Loyola Sacred Heart’s late start to the football season hasn’t hampered the Rams at all. They’re undefeated with just three games left in the regular season already — even if they were late to the party.
The Rams (4-0) have won all four games by an increasingly lopsided total, quickly verging on blowouts by the midpoint of the season. The only thing that’s been able to keep them down this year hasn’t been on the football field in fact. Continue reading
Tristen Clark, an athlete of the week honorable mention
Sometimes newspapers make mistakes. I know, I know, inconceivable right?
In this past week’s Prep Athlete of the Week, a Missoulian weekly staple among the sports pages, we nominated Tristen Clark of Deer Lodge football for the boys’ honor. He had thrown for two touchdowns, run for two more, caught a TD pass and also intercepted a pass on defense and returned that to the end zone for a touchdown.
Or so we thought. Continue reading
Wading through Hellgate's two-QB system
To say the Missoula Hellgate Knights have struggled on offense would be, well, offensive. Through four games, the Knights hadn’t scored a point and were needless to say 0-4.
But that was before co-quarterback Andy Nemec got the lion’s share of the signal-calling duties in the Hellgate backfield.
The senior — who is still listed as wide receiver on the team’s depth chart — was a wildcat-only option in Hellgate’s offense. In layman’s terms, he was only brought in to run the ball while the “passing QB” Brayden Frohlich worked the throwing downs. Continue reading