Soccer season closes with tough loss at Pana

PANA – Vandalia’s offense struggled to maintain possession, and Pana made some defensive adjustments at Saturday’s regional tournament to shut out the Vandals in a rematch of the season-opener.

The Panthers won, 4-3, back on Aug. 29, but allowed Vandalia just four shots on goal in winning the regional play-in game, 3-0.

“It’s tough seeing that game knowing how we played them the first time,” said Vandals coach Walt Kinney. “They were definitely the best team today, and they took it to us early.

“We couldn’t seem to put anything together,” he said. “We had two shots on goal in the first half and two shots on goal in the second half, and you won’t win many games like that.”

Pana scored two goals within a few minutes of each other early in the first half, and then continued to control to ball for most of the period, scoring another goal in the latter minutes of the half.

Allowing multiple goals in a short time span was an area that the Vandals (2-15-2) struggled with all season.

“Every time we get scored on, it seems to come in twos,” Kinney said. “For whatever reason, we don’t seem to be into it after the first goal, and if you’re out of it for even 10 seconds, a team will jump on you.”

He said his players had a lack of good touch on their passes, leading to many poor possessions in the loss.

Part of that, Kinney said, was because Pana switched some of their speedy defenders to different position than in the season-opener.

“Our speed was what we were counting on in this game, and they adjusted to put some of their faster players on the back of the defense,” Kinney said.

Despite not earning the program’s first-ever regional tournament game victory, the season was still one of the best in Vandalia’s history.

The program record for wins is three, but the offensive output – 26 goals – was the finest of all-time.

Senior Colin Ledbetter was the leading contributor, scoring eight times and assisting on six other goals. Juniors Austin Durbin (six), Matt Rademacher (five) and Craig Spearman (three) were other leading scorers.

Junior Blake Torbeck had 185 saves on the season, including 10 on Saturday.

“You can’t be too upset about what these guys have done,” Kinney said. “Since I have been coaching, this is the best team I have been a part of, because they are good kids who wanted to learn and were eager to play.”