Late surge puts BRHS girls’ soccer on verge of states

By: Sean Moylan Sports Writer
    For the Bordentown Regional High girls’ varsity soccer team, the math is simple.
    “We need to win or tie a game to make the playoffs,” said the Scotties’ Hall of Fame girls’ varsity soccer coach Dominick Castaldo this past Monday.
    This season, at a time when most coaches would have just packed it in and experimented with different lineups for next year’s club, Castaldo looked past serious injuries to eight key players and believed in his remaining healthy girls to make a playoff push. The first thing he and his assistant coach Chris O’Leary had to do, however, was develop some team-
continuity with the younger players.
    “We have a situation where we are using players we didn’t anticipate using this season,” said Castaldo, who is very pleased with the effort all of his players have given this year. “Even with all these young players I have been starting the same team the past few games and I’ve had the same rotation in all of those games. We’re coming around under the circumstances.”
    One of the reasons the Scotties have been successful in recent weeks is the players know their roles and they embrace them.
    A huge part of Kayla Pagnani’s role on the team is to score goals when she has an opening. And the talented Scotties’ striker found daylight in the Panthers’ net and scored both of Bordentown’s goals in a 2-0 victory over a pretty strong playoff-bound Palmyra team at Palmyra this past Friday. Lauren Donaher set up Pagnani’s first goal while Leah Shaw had the assist on Pagnini’s second-half tally.
    “We scored the first goal in two and a half minutes and that set the tone for the rest of the game,” said Castaldo, whose team blasted 16 shots on goal to just 10 by the Panthers. “We did a nice job.”
    As a team, Bordentown did a fantastic job of keeping Palmyra’s explosive goal machine Chelsea Grace off the scoreboard by playing smothering defense on her. Scotties’ goalie Nicole Walls had a solid game with four saves.
    Bordentown needed the win over Palmyra because it had lost a 3-0 home game to Cinnaminson only a day before (last Thursday). In the game against the Pirates, the Scotties surrendered a trio of first-
half goals and that was basically the whole story.
    “The bottom line is that Cinnaminson is a good team and we made mistakes in the first half and they made us pay for it. And we didn’t do much with our opportunities,” said Castaldo.
    Cinnaminson outshot Bordentown, 22-7. Walls made 12 saves for the Scotties.
    Bordentown (7-6-1) was scheduled to have played Rancocas Valley but that contest was postponed until November 1st. Bordentown was scheduled to have played a road game at Delran yesterday (Wednesday). Depending on the result of that contest, today’s (Thursday) scheduled home game versus Moorestown could end up being a huge game for the Scotties, who have worked so hard to get to where they are that they deserve to make the playoffs.