by: Marisa Papagelis
The Rangers girls’ soccer team has had a successful start to their 2016 season despite graduating 14 seniors last season. With a record of three wins, two ties, and one loss, the fairly young team consists of just six returning players, only one of them is a senior.
The team is captained by senior, and four-year varsity player, Emily Longo and junior Claire Hounslow, who is in the middle of her third varsity season. Hounslow is the first junior captain that the team has had in a while, emphasizing how young the team is this year.
“We didn’t know what to expect since we lost over half of the team, but we have been doing much better than we thought we would this early in the season,” says junior Tess Garrity.
“We lost a lot of seniors last year, and the team has really come together to start winning tough games and it’s been a lot of fun,” adds junior Abby Burger.
The Rangers are currently in the middle of a winning streak and things are starting to look better for the remainder of the season. “The season started off rather slow, but it is going well so far! We are now on a winning streak so that is really pumping us up,” says junior Sarissa Volin. “I think this is because we are all just learning how each of us plays individually and putting everything together to build our team. I hope we can continue our winning streak from here!”
Seeing as the team is composed of a majority of juniors, the team is looking at this year as a transition year. “This year is good preparation because it’s exposing all of the new players to a level of varsity play. It is especially helpful because almost our entire team is new to varsity,” says Volin. “We have so many juniors being able to play this year, which will only make our senior year that much more successful.”
As for the rest of the season, Garrity expresses her excitement for the Under the Lights game on October 6 as an upcoming highlight. “I’m very excited about the game because most of our team has never gotten to play under the lights before. It’s against Nashoba so it will be a tough and competitive game!”
