The Blue Valley Northwest boys varsity soccer team kicked off their season on Aug. 26, in a game against Blue Valley North, that resulted in a tie. Going into the game, junior Holden Jayaram said that although the BVN Mustangs are their rivals, the team needed to focus on themselves and how they wanted to play.

“We just need to play our game and not let the other opponent sike us out just because it’s a big game and a rivalry game,” Jayaram said.

The game began with BVN scoring the first point of the night, but the Huskies responded less than five minutes later with a goal scored by senior Tanay Dunthulri. After this goal, the Huskies made sure to stay motivated, according to Pollack.

“I wasn’t worried that we would come back. It was just about grinding it out and they responded,” Pollak said. 

With 12:49 left in the first half, the Mustangs scored their second goal, causing the Huskies to go into the second half trailing BVN, 2-1. Jayaram said that after BVN scored their second point, the team had to work together in order to have a shot at winning.

“We just really believed in each other and remembered that we’re all in this together so we just played as a team,” Jayaram said.

Keeping up with this mentality, near the beginning of the second half, Jayaram scored the second and final goal of the night for the Huskies.

“I was just excited and that was my first varsity goal. It was a big goal and part of a big night,” Jayaram said.

At the end of regulation, the score was still tied, 2-2, and so the two teams went into overtime. According to Jayaram, the team made formation changes in order to create more chances to score.

“We started in a 4-back and switched to a 3-back towards the end so that we could have more attacking opportunities,” Jayaram said.

Despite this change in formation, both the Huskies and the Mustangs did not score in overtime, resulting in a 2-2 tie.

Moving forward, Pollack said he wants the team to work on playing simple soccer so they can keep improving throughout the season.

“Defensively we had to rotate some pieces, we got some injuries so we got to find some continuity [and] we gotta work on some 1v1 defending,” Pollack said. “We got to just work on playing simple.”

Similarly, Jayaram said he hopes the team can also continue to improve for the next upcoming games. 

“[We] definitely [need to] stay mentally focused and start off the game strong because we came into this game thinking we would beat them, but we need to come into every game like the other team is not worse than us,” Jayaram said.