Temple Soccer Refuses To Lose
WRITTEN BY: ROCCO DISANGRO
PHILADELPHIA, PA – The 17th ranked Temple Men’s Soccer team has been playing with a “refuse to lose” attitude, and that is mainly due to the fact that the Owls are yet to drop a match this season. Temple won its sixth game of the season on Sunday night in a Big 5 battle against the Penn Quakers to move to 6-0-1 on the year. Owls’ midfielder Jorge Gomez Sanchez registered a hat trick in Temple’s 3-0 win over Penn, netting his 8th, 9th and 10th goals of the season. Gomez Sanchez is setting the American Athletic Conference leader-boards on fire, ranking first in shots (39), points (21), goals (10), and game-winning goals (5).
While Gomez Sanchez has been phenomenal on the offensive side of the ball, goalkeeper Alex Cagle and Temple’s defense are the reason that the Owls have shut out 4 of the 7 teams they have faced this year. Although Cagle is the last line of defense for the Owls, he credits the guys in front of him for the team’s defensive success, “I definitely think the defense is the biggest part to our success so far, not me but definitely the back line” said Cagle, “Our two new defensive mids (midfielders) have really separated us from last year, I think adding Carlos (Moros Gracia) in the middle there, him and (Brendon) Creed and the back line are really making a huge difference.”
Cagle, has already won American Athletic Conference Goalkeeper of the Week honors three times this season and leads goalkeepers in the conference with a save percentage of .875%.
The way Temple is playing this season is very encouraging looking ahead to next year, and although the 2015 season isn’t even at the halfway point yet, this Temple team is still young with just four seniors on the current squad. Matt Mahoney, who is a junior defender and the captain of the team says the team hasn’t really thought about it that much yet, but he thinks that a young roster will be a contributing factor going into next year.
“It is encouraging looking at our team,” Mahoney said. “We have a lot of juniors this year, especially going into next year we will have an older class, the guys will have more experience, like Hermann (Doerner) in the midfield he’s only a freshman, so next year he’ll still be here and we’ll have a lot of our lineup here and its encouraging knowing that we have really two years for the chunk of our lineup to get better and keep progressing.”
The Owls look to stay undefeated on Wednesday when they take on La Salle in another Big 5 matchup at the Temple Ambler Campus. Game time is set for 3 p.m.
