Morgan joins Neuqua Valley's scoring list

Neuqua Valley's Emma Morgan had a huge smile on her face on Thursday night.

She had good reason to be in such a chipper mood as the senior defender scored her first goal and the Wildcats cruised past Sandburg 5-0 in an opening game in the Naperville Invitational at Naperville Central.

"That was super exciting," Morgan said. "I'm glad (coach Joe Moreau) gave me a second opportunity after I flubbed the first one."

Moreau was pretty ecstatic to see a hard worker like Morgan produce such a great result.

"She works her tail off and last year she started a lot and now is playing limited minutes," he said. "But she comes out and works hard in practice and pushes the other girls. One of the other nice things we have is we're so deep and push the starters. Morgan's upbeat and an intelligent kid and part of that goal was she read that the wall wasn't set right."

Neuqua Valley (5-2-2), which has won five straight after opening the season winless in its first four games, jumped on the Eagles early.

Junior Alyssa Bombacino scored on a penalty kick with 29:40 remaining in the first half and then she set up senior forward Ryan Gareis for a goal with 27:08 remaining.

"I'm not sure if it was a cross or a shot," Moreau said about Gareis' goal. "Even our stat guy asked do we count that as a shot, but it went in."

Bombacino then broke the game open midway through the first half, scoring with 22:03 remaining to make it 3-0.

"I thought we did a good job today and we came out stronger than the last time we played them," Bombacino said. "I thought we controlled the midfield compared to what we've usually done."

Moreau was extremely pleased with how the Wildcats dominated play in the midfield.

"I thought the midfield played really well today so that made a huge difference," he said. "I think it's important to just get people scoring. We don't have anyone who has scored a lot of goals, but we've had a number of girls who have scored. So it's hard to say, 'OK, we've got to shut down this player because she's scored 12 goals' because we don't have that. We have probably 10 different goal scorers, which is a nice thing for us."

That includes sophomore Danielle Hopkins who scored early in the second half, and Morgan who scored with 2:15 left in the game.

"I think we're really starting to click as a team and getting to know each other and it just took us a couple of games to get used to it," Morgan said. "Now we're playing really well together and connecting a lot better than we did the first couple of the games, and the bench is providing energy which helps a lot too."

Kasey Gillespie and Yanel Ortiz split duties as goalkeepers for the Wildcats but didn't have to stop any shot attempts from the Eagles.