Mustangs prepare for Round 2, South Hills

The Grapevine boys soccer team earned a postseason victory last week, defeating Azle by a score of 2-0 to advance to the area round where it will take on Fort Worth South Hills.

Coach Health Bullard said he has had a chance to scout South Hills a bit and said that he feels pretty certain that his team will have its hands full.

“We're probably going to see a little bit of what we have been seeing,” Bullard said. “They saw us play the other night, so I am not sure if they are going to try to pack it back on us and maybe steal a goal, like some teams have been doing lately. Then again, they my try to play wide open and I'll say, ‘Hey, we're going to have to play with these guys.’

“They've got a couple of guys with some speed and they have some skill. Hopefully, we'll get out of there with a win.”

Grapevine will play South Hills at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday at Saginaw High School.

Grapevine was able to shut out Azle in its playoff opener last Thursday night, and Bullard said that it was a pretty good effort from his team all the way around.

“We played pretty well,” Bullard said. “We got into their game a little bit early. We tried to play hard counter-game and send too many big balls, but then we we settled down a bit. Chad (Sahinkaya) hit a heck of shot for the first goal of the game, and they had two guys on him the entire game.”

Garrett Hammer scored the second goal of the game for Grapevine on an assist from Logan Jenkins.

Bullard said that there were other players that really stepped it up against Azle.

“A lot of guys played well,” Bullard said. “Holden Flora in the back was outstanding. I thought that Logan and Victor Herrera played well in the midfield. (Francesco) Reniero played pretty well up top, and really everybody played pretty well.”

Bullard said that while the team is healing up, the Mustangs are still without some key players.

“We are a little healthier,” Bullard said. “We had one starting defender that did not play. He is our long throw-in guy, so that hurt us a little bit, because he's got 10 assists this year.”

Bullard said that for his team to continue with the success it has had and have a good run into the postseason, it will have to keep up with a lot of what it is already doing and make a couple of tweaks as well.

“You can't question the effort whatsoever,” Bullard said. “Now, do we play smart all the time? No, we could do a better job of that at times. But, hopefully we're getting some of that stuff worked out. We're getting healthier. We took a light day the other day, and we've already got our game set up with South Hills.”

This story was originally published March 30, 2015 at 3:32 PM with the headline "Mustangs prepare for Round 2, South Hills."