See what Coach Taylor Roden and some of her players had to say about the upcoming Lafayette girls’ soccer season.
Jared Peck, Real-Time Sports Reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader and co-founder of SoccerintheBluegrass.com, visited all nine Lexington high schools and spoke with coaches and players about the upcoming season. Over the next several days, SITB will release the notes and videos from those interviews that were used for the Herald-Leader’s preseason preview: Girls’ soccer: Big players, big games, high stakes in Lexington
KHSAA link: Lafayette schedule
Lafayette Coach Taylor Roden
Putting some more goals in the net, that’s a big goal for our team this year. We score more and be more of an attacking threat, so I’m looking forward to that.
I learned that it was more fun than I could even imagine. I had a blast. The girls were great. It was so much fun playing under the lights here at Lafayette. … I really just learned that these girls can work. They are willing to put the work in, and it’s hard work, but it’s worth it, every bit of it.
Lindi – She was nominated for all-region, I think she ended up being second team all-region. She scored a lot of goals for us, … and controls our midfield.
Brenna has come in pre-season ready to rock. She’s come in fit. She’s been a great leader and I really think she’s going to have a really big, standout season this year.
It is a very tough district, absolutely. It’s the District of Death. Last year, our goal was defense. The season before we came they had 95 or 99 goals against, something like that.
Our goal was to come in and really step up the defensive pressure to really work as a team defensively, and we did that. We cut the goals against by a lot. Now, we want to step up the offensive attack.
Our goal is to compete. We had a couple of games the season before last where we got mercy ruled and (last) season, I don’t think we lost a district game by more than three or four goals. We’re coming in to compete. We want to be a threat. We don’t want people to look at Lafayette and think they’re going to roll. We’re going to go down fighting and I think we’re going to sneak in a win or two against some of these teams.
Sydney Garrett, senior goalkeeper who tore ACL on Sept. 21 in game against LCA
I’m really excited. We’ve gotten a lot better. We’ve got a lot of new people coming up. It’ll be a fun year.
It’s a different angle for sure from being behind them to being next to them. You see things from their perspective. I learned more about what it’s like to be out there. It looks farther to run. Everything looked a lot farther. From the back you just get a back angle, but you don’t realize ‘oh, they ran from the 40 to the 40. You don’t realize how far things go or how fast the game always is.
Lindi DeBilzan, junior
I think the group of girls that we have is a really good group. We’re all working really hard to, hopefully, get some more wins on the sheet. I’m really excited.
Coach Taylor’s come in and done a really good job with the program and rebuilding it. We definitely focused more on defense, which led to some more goals on our offensive side.
It’s hard taking some of those losses, but at the end of the day, you’re playing those really good teams and you’re getting better, but it sucks to lose.
Brenna Wallin, junior
Last year, I thought we were just trying to restart everything, just rebuilding and this year, we’ve got a basis to do things now. We just want to score more this year. Last year we had a really strong defense, and this year, we’re trying to focus more on (getting) forward.
