SANFORD — Facing one of the Sandhills Athletic Conference’s highest-scoring teams Friday, the Richmond Senior High School girls soccer team couldn’t close out the regular season with a win.
A night after bruising Scotland in an eight-goal victory, the tables turned for the Lady Raiders at second-place Lee County High School.
Despite playing “a quality first half” against the Lady Yellow Jackets, Richmond fell 5-0.
Lee County (18-4, 10-2 SAC) netted a goal in the first half before adding four tallies in the second 40 minutes of action.
Scoring three goals was Gillian Garrison, while Ava Baldwin and Ava Perez each added a solo goal.
“The score doesn’t really indicate how well we played tonight, especially in the first half,” head coach Chris Larsen said. “We just had a lapse in the second half where we allowed three goals in a seven or eight-minute span.
“I told the girls that they played better than we have in our last five or six matches. We created chances to score and had several opportunities sliding the ball across from the wings. We had a couple of corners, but just couldn’t score. That’s been our Achilles heel.
“It’s good that we’re trending back up in the right direction,” he closed. “Depending on how many games we get in with potential weather coming in, we may have to wait and see if what we’ve done to this point in the season has been good enough to make the state playoffs.”
The Lady Raiders ended the regular season with an 8-11-3 overall record and a 4-7-1 mark within the SAC.
Finishing fourth in the final standings, the No. 4 Lady Raiders will host No. 5 Southern Lee High School (10-9, 4-8 SAC) Monday for the first round of the SAC tournament. Kickoff is set for 6 p.m.
Larsen said that with the potential for wet weather, there is a possibility that the SAC tournament will not be played. More information will be published if that becomes the case.
