Spiders enter last leg
There’s an old soccer adage that says that all a team has to do to win a league championship is to win every home game and tie every game on the road.
The Spokane Spiders have half that equation down pat.
Spokane heads into the final five games of its Premier Development League season with the prospect of reaching the playoffs still alive.
“But we’re going to need some help,” team director Al Brown said. “Obviously, our goal is to win our three final home games and win our final road series at Yakima and at Abbotsford, B.C.”
The team, in third place in the league standings with five wins against six losses, plays host to the Ogden Outlaws tonight at 7:05 at Spokane Falls Community College, then hosts Northwest Division-leading BYU on Saturday.
The Spiders will donate a portion of the proceeds from Saturday’s game to the Wishing Star Foundation.
The Spiders made their Utah swing on their first road trip of the season, dropping at 2-0 decision at Ogden and a 3-1 decision to BYU at Provo.
“That was an interesting trip,” Brown said. “We allowed Ogden to score its first goal of the season. The next night we were beating BYU through the first 87 minutes of the match, then lost it in the final three minutes.”
That underscores the difficulty of playing on the road in the PDL, he said.
“That Utah trip is a killer, and so was playing Colorado on back-to-back nights on another trip,” he said. “These are all tough places to play, especially when you’re playing one game on Friday night and turning around and playing again on Saturday.”
Ogden and BYU will be highly motivated this weekend, Brown predicted.
BYU has a 9-1-1 record going into the Cougars’ game tonight at Yakima. Ogden is 4-4-2 overall and, like Spokane, winless on the road.
A key to the Spiders’ success has been its stellar goaltending, especially at home. Only Tacoma and Yakima managed more than a single goal at SFCC.
“Hawk Mummey has been incredible in goal for us, but he’s still on a trip to Peru, so he’ll be out for this weekend,” Brown said. “But our backup goalkeepers have been just as tough. We’ll need it.”
Grant Lundberg scored twice to key the win over Yakima last Sunday, while teammate Jake Moug, just back from Las Vegas, has been one of the league’s most accurate shooters. Former Central Valley standout and current Community Colleges of Spokane player Jay Villa scored his first goal in PDL play against Yakima – his first of what Brown predicts will be many.
“One of the things I told United Soccer Leagues when we applied for the franchise was that I thought that we have talent here in Spokane that is as good as any in the country,” Brown said. “Our roster is made up of local players and we’re happy to give them this chance to show off just how good they are to the rest of the country.”
Brown said the team may do some roster juggling for the final road trip of the season in hopes of breaking its losing streak.
“Under PDL rules, you’re allowed to roster 18 players for a particular game,” he said. “What we may do is send some players directly to Abbotsford for Saturday’s game. That way we can have some fresh legs available for that game. We could conceivably have an entirely different roster for that game.”