Gresham/Bowler boys soccer team falls to Northland Lutheran

The Gresham/Bowler boys soccer team dropped a Central Wisconsin Conference match to Northland Lutheran on Sept. 16 in Gresham, falling 5-1.

The outcome was still a good one for the Gresham/Bowler co-op, especially considering the team played with one less player than Northland Lutheran all game.

Northland Lutheran had a majority of the strong offensive attacks in the early going, but Gresham/Bowler scored the first goal.

Cody Mehlberg got the ball deep into Northland Lutheran territory and then found Colby Belongia, who got the ball past the keeper for the first score.

“He passed it up to me, I got past all the defenders and then I shot it into the goal,” said Belongia of the play.

Unfortunately for the co-op, the strong start to the match didn’t serve as a sign of things to come. A couple minutes after the first goal, Northland Lutheran scored the equalizer.

The visitors’ constant attacking led to tons of shots on goal, but Gresham/Bowler goalie Kaidyen Zaitz and the defense in front of him did a solid job at keeping the match tight.

Northland Lutheran took the lead with a goal in the final minutes of the first half.

The visitors then took control with another score early in the second half. As the deficit started to grow for Gresham/Bowler, the effort level began to go down, according to a couple co-op players.

“I feel like once they started scoring their goals, we got demoralized,” said Edward Castellanos. “As they kept scoring, we kept getting more and more demoralized. So we need to work on that.”

While Zaitz and the defense were able to fend off several attacks, on one of the few occasions the group did not, Northland Lutheran took advantage for its fourth goal.

Gresham/Bowler was able to push the ball into Northland Lutheran’s side of the field a couple times late in the match, with Castellanos getting a few cracks at scores, but the visitors’ goalie was able to turn away the shots.

Eventually, Northland Lutheran netted its fifth goal to finish off the scoring for the match.

Gresham/Bowler interim coach Cory Bougie still walked away from the match pleased at the team’s performance, commenting that they played hard.

Only having 10 players, with each needing to play all game, took its toll on the co-op, but the players also didn’t use it as an excuse.

“I don’t know, with only 10 it’s pretty hard, as you’d probably guess,” said Zaitz. “I’d say we did pretty good. There were a couple goals I could have saved, but it happens.”

“It’s hard, because you can’t sub out to anybody and get a drink. You have to play all game and you get really tired,” said Belongia.

Along with not getting down on themselves after falling behind or giving up goals, Castellanos didn’t think there were a ton of things the team really had to clean up.

“We did great but passing, we need to up that a little bit,” said Castellanos. “But other than that, I think we did good all the way around.”

From the perspective of the goalie, Zaitz said the team needs to a better job of marking up. “There were a lot of times where someone would run through and there’d be no one on them.”

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