ST. CHARLES – Naperville Central’s defense has been solid all season. The offense has been more of a work in progress, but the Redhawks may be peaking at the right time.
On Saturday, Joshua Weigel and Nathan Dodsworth scored, and the Redhawks generated several other good scoring chances while beating St. Charles North 2-0 in a non-conference matchup in St. Charles.
Joey LoDuca and Mateo Lopez recorded the assists for the Redhawks.
“I thought it was probably the most complete game we’ve played,” said Naperville Central coach Troy Adams. “We’ve played well defensively the whole year, but I think it’s the first time we were able to get out and really attack.”
With a full week of practice leading up to the game, Adams stressed being more aggressive on offense by getting some balls to the net.
“You ask kids to do certain things and when it actually happens, you’re kind of happy about it,” he said. “We spent this whole week of practice talking about, ‘The shot doesn’t have to be perfect, but you have to take it.’ There’s kids on the team that can shoot, we’ve just got to convince them to shoot.”
Weigel got Central (3-2-4) on the board with a long run up the left side. His shot on the ground from around 15 yards out found the back of the net.
The Redhawks got a big insurance goal late when Dodsworth took a feed from Lopez and found himself all alone in front of St. Charles North keeper Alex Curtis. Curtis got a hand on his bullet from 10 yards away but couldn’t get enough to keep it out of the net.
“Overall, the offense played a lot better,” Dodsworth said. “We’ve been working on it all week. I feel like we really put it together. We were making runs and working off of each other much better. There wasn’t a lot of stagnant stuff.”
The Redhawks had some other chances. Curtis stopped a point-blank shot by LoDuca and made a sliding stop of a breakaway chance by Dodsworth. Earlier, Sean O’Reilly’s shot hit the crossbar.
Curtis, St. Charles North’s freshman goalkeeper, acquitted himself well in his first start, posting four saves.
The North Stars couldn’t generate much offensively for most of the game. Central keeper Caden Redpath stopped Liam Kelly and Sam Strader in the first half on the way to posting the shutout.
“In the first half we had a couple of defensive errors but we possessed the ball well,” said North Stars defender Mark Sollenberger. “In the second half, we were really trying to put in goals because obviously we were running out of time. We had one crossbar, a couple over the net, a couple of saves. So we were close, we just didn’t find the back of the net.”