Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Eastern New Mexico University men’s soccer coach Tyler Hart believes his team is playing better than its 1-4-1 record indicates.
“The results haven’t gone the way we want, but our play has been good,” Hart said.
“We lost to Texas A&M (International), who is ranked sixth, but I thought we outplayed them. We’ve just been having trouble putting the ball into the net.”
One of the reasons the Greyhounds have had trouble scoring is two of their top point producers are injured.
Junior Carlos Viveros, who Hart calls one of their best attackers, will miss the next couple of games and freshman Ignacio Dicun is on pace to return next Friday.
“We have missed them, but we have to get better at finishing. Right now we’re not hitting the net and troubling the keeper.”
Part of the strategy to get more offense is to change formations, something the Greyhounds could experiment with as soon as today in their home match against Newman (5-1).
Game time is 4 p.m.
“We’re considering going to a 3-4-3 formation, which is more of an attacking formation,” Hart said. “Defensively, we’re good, but we need to get more attackers to the net and this formation will do that.”
Hart admitted that he doesn’t know much about Newman.
“I know very little about Newman, but we do know that despite their schedule they’re not the strongest team, and they’ve played a lot of teams we don’t know,” Hart said. “However, their record is still 5-1, so we have to assume they have that record for a reason, so we won’t underestimate them.”
This game will be Newman’s first road game of the season, and the combined record of the team they’ve beaten is 7-21-6. The one team Newman did lose to was Midwestern State, which is the only team its faced that had a winning record.
Hart believes that his team will perform well today and that could be a springboard to more wins in the future.
“Our results are disappointing, but the guys know we’ve been out-playing teams in our recent games, so they’ve come into practice upbeat and ready to work.”
