Cardinals claim win over Blue Jays

BONDURANT — On a windy night on the soccer field, Newton High’s Cardinal boys scored with the wind and defended the second half against the wind. They built a 3-1 halftime lead over host Bondurant-Farrar and won by that score.

“This was our second complete game of the season, and it came at the right time. We knew this game was important for us to win,” Newton head coach Zach Jensen said. “Games through Saturday count for substate pairings, which come out next week.”

Newton found out last week it is in the Class 2A Substate No. 2 with CAL, Collins-Maxwell/Baxter, Hudson, Iowa Falls-Alden and South Tama. With the Thursday’s victory, the Cardinals are 8-4 overall.

“We’re watching the scores from other games this week. We’d like a first-round bye as one of the top two teams. It would be nice to have home-field advantage,” Jensen said.

Bondurant-Farrar joins Prairie City-Monroe, ADM, Ballard, Carlisle and Perry in Class 2A Substate No. 7.

Jensen said he was pleased with how his team played Thursday against the Blue Jays. He said the Cardnals have been the team in catch-up mode in most of their games this season.

“Not tonight — we scored in the first 20 seconds of the game. It really set the tone for us. We took the wind in the first half, scored three goals and in the second half, we defended really well against them using the wind on long balls,” Jensen said.

Jacob Murphy ripped a shot at the goal which went into the net after the ball deflected off the B-F goalkeeper. Murphy scored again with 11:12 remaining in the first half on a crossing pass from Joe Stammeyer.

Tyler Stanton took a pass from Murphy and found the back of the net to put Newton up 3-0 with 7:39 left on the first-half clock. The Blue Jays scored a minute later.

Reagan Maple was in goal for the Cardinals, and was credited with nine saves. Newton had 11 shots on goal and seven corner kick opportunities in the game.

“Reagan made some huge saves to keep us in the lead,” Jensen said.

Newton’s JV-A won 3-2 Thursday on goals by Austin Johansen, Preston Sherwood and Tyler Griener.

Newton steps back into Little Hawkeye Conference action in a 7 p.m. game Tuesday at home against Norwalk.

Contact Jocelyn Sheets at
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