Boys soccer: Timothy Christian finds motivation to beat St. Francis

As a real estate agent, Joel Zielke helps sell houses for a living.

But as the Timothy Christian boys soccer coach, he might want to consider a side gig in the motivational speech industry because whatever he told his kids during halftime of Tuesday's 4-1 Metro Suburban Blue win over St. Francis worked wonders and needs to be printed, bottled and sold.

"I gave them a little encouragement," Zielke said. "We were definitely a little frustrated and they were with themselves. They knew they needed to play together and it's a solid group. They really came together and this was a game that they wanted to come out on top."

The Trojans trailed 1-0 at the half but scored four goals in 12 minutes to open the second half to completely take over what appeared destined to go down to the final horn.

"We just got overwhelmed," Spartans coach Kevin Ward said. "There's really not much more to say. We just got steamrolled and we've got to be ready for that."

Timothy Christian (12-2-2, 2-2) is rolling over a lot of teams this fall, but it took the Trojans an entire half to get into a groove in this game.

"We weren't aggressive in the final third," Zielke said. "That was the difference between the first half. Our runs were a lot more dynamic."

Wheaton Academy (5-8-1, 3-2) had enjoyed a 1-0 advantage at halftime thanks to senior Frank Marsico's unassisted goal with 2:18 left before the break.

That lead lasted just 4:30 into the second half as Josh Bode hammered home a rebound off sophomore Brenton DuBoise's initial shot to make it 1-1.

The game was then tied for all of 50 seconds until Carson Hooker fed Bode the go-ahead goal with 34:20 still to play in the game.

"Goals come in bunches, I guess," Bode said. "Once we get it going it's pretty easy to go from there. If you noticed, we weren't going long much on our goal kicks. We were playing to the side and trying to play through the midfield. That really helped."

Senior forward Jonathan Stremler said his Trojans were ill prepared mentally and failed to move enough offensively so wake-up call midway through the game was definitely needed.

"We didn't come out mentally prepared; the field conditions kind of got to our heads," he said. "We didn't start out strong, but top teams always grind it out until the end to get the result."

Movement proved to be key.

"We were playing stagnant in the first half," he said. "We just knew our offense had to move more. We made one mistake on defense and cleaned that up, put in a couple goals and that was it."

Hooker finished the scoring with a penalty kick with 28:19 left in the game.

"It started to snowball there," Zielke said. "And confidence is high with this group. We're playing well."

Timothy Christian has won 10 of 11.

The Spartans will look to toss this game aside and move forward.

"We've had a few of these games," Ward said. "The conditions tonight were tough, so it wasn't a pretty game by any means, so we'll bang it and run."