Box Score Coming of its first Sooner Athletic Conference win, the Wayland Baptist men's soccer team went into Friday's match against Southwestern Assemblies of God looking to even their conference record before heading into the second half of conference play. The Pioneers did just that, gaining a big confidence booster with a lopsided, 5-0 win over the Lions at J.V. Hilliard Field.
Wayland (8-4, 2-2) was held to a single goal in the first half, but came out firing in the second half, scoring four goals on the Lions.
Almost 20 minutes into the match, Taval Whitaker passed the ball through SAGU's (4-5-2, 1-3-0) defense to
Javier Parry, who shot towards the bottom left-hand corner of the goal for his first score of the year and to give Wayland a 1-0 lead.
It took the Pioneers just five and a half minutes to get their first goal of the second period, and just three minutes later, WBU put the game out of reach for good.
Ezequiel Amestoy put Wayland up 2-0 with a nice deflection after a corner kick, while
Renato Dos Anjos, who assisted Amestoy's goal, made a couple of moves before firing a shot from five yards outside of the box, extending the lead, 3-0.
Whitaker picked up his seventh goal of the year in the 77
th minute, and
D'Angelo Garcia capped off the scoring with his first-career goal on a beautiful header with just 29 seconds remaining.
After being shutout in their first two conference matches and taking 90-plus minutes to score twice on Mid-America Christian last Saturday, the Pioneers finally capitalized on their chances Friday. Wayland took 13 shots, seven of which were on target, for five goals.
"We did a good job of scoring today," head coach Cristian Ospina said. "We were successful today because we scored on every opportunity that we had."
Ospina also gave credit to several Pioneers who came off the bench and gave Wayland a big boast in Friday's big win.
"Anytime you can get four or five goals is really good, especially in conference. We had a couple of different guys start for us today that played really well, and we also had guys coming off the bench that gave us very good production.
"We also put Juan (Sanchez) in a new position today and he did a great job there."
For their next match, the Pioneers travel to Shawnee, Okla. to take on St. Gregory's (3-7, 0-4) at 3 p.m. Tuesday. In their last meeting, the Cavaliers defeated
Wayland, 1-0, knocking the Pioneers out of the 2014 SAC Tournament in the opening round.
"This week gave us a lot of confidence," Ospina said about going into Tuesday's game. "It shows that whatever it is we're doing, we're doing it really well.
"We need to stay humble and keep working hard because it's always hard to play on the road. This win gives us confidence going in, and if we keep scoring goals then we'll be OK, but you can't expect to score like that against every team."
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