MORGANTOWN — Morgantown senior Kylie Bennett sizes up the University defense from the left wing — suddenly, she dodges inside toward the crease, then back toward the center of the field.
Seeing a narrow opening, she launches a shot at UHS keeper Riley Phares while she fades away from the goal. The ball lands perfectly in the back of the net, giving MHS a 4-2 advantage. As it turned out, that small opening was all Bennett needed.
Granted, there never seemed an opening too small for a Kylie Bennett goal March 28, as she nabbed a hat trick in the opening nine minutes of play en route to a seven-goal game. The stout performance helped lead the Mohigans to 10-5 win over their host. Bennett’s only regret regarding the game, she said with a laugh, was that she didn’t get that eighth goal.
“We could tell at the beginning that it was not working [offensively] in certain places, so I just tried my best to go in,” Bennett said. “What goes through my mind is just, ‘Score another.’ ”
Bennett scoring was indeed a common theme throughout the evening; whenever UHS defenders heard the words “Kylie Bennett with the ball” over the P.A., they knew they had to be on edge.
“She’s a player of the year, an MVP,” MHS coach Suzann Bane said. “She has a tremendous impact on the game.”
It was a slow start for MHS. The Mohigans went down 1-0 early to a UHS goal courtesy of Mackenzie Slavensky, but soon found their rhythm, outscoring their opponents, 5-1, through the rest of the first half.
“We got off to a sluggish start, and they did kind of shut down our transition a bit in the middle, but we started to get some hot spots on the goalie and going for different spots, and that opened it up,” Bane said.
MHS attacked hard from buzzer-to-buzzer offensively, outpacing the Hawks with fundamentally sound, well-executed transition offense. While they couldn’t match the tempo of MHS, Hawks coach Kevin Armstrong was happy with his squad’s offensive effort.
“Except for a couple things, transitioning the ball back and forth, I thought when we had the ball, we controlled it well, we got into our sets, and we had success,” he said. “They’re a talented team, well-coached, and they got the ball up and down the field. We just got ourselves in trouble when we couldn’t get back.”
When not outmatched by the MHS transition, the Hawks proved an aggressive, physical defensive presence, forcing their opponents to earn every scoring opportunity. According to Bennett, it’s a style she is well accustomed to, though that doesn’t make it any easier to play against.
“It’s kind of similar to our defense, and we scrimmage each other in practice a lot, so we’re kind of used to it,” she said. “We know how to cope with that. It’s harder to score on those types of teams, but it’s similar to what we know.”
The exclamation point on the tough UHS defensive performance was Phares, who, despite taking the loss in net, made tough, highlight worthy saves all evening in what Armstrong called one heck of a game.
“You have to do anything at that point,” Bennett said of her battle against Phares. “With good goalies, you have to fake, shoot high, shoot low; you just have to try and go in as best as you can and trick them out as best as you can to put the ball in the back of the net. You have to go in with a purpose.”
