There are no smiles when talking to members of the boys soccer team about their season. A 7-9 record is disappointing, especially to this team.

“We have yet to catch a break this season. We just couldn’t get anything to fall our way it seemed like,” left back Jonathan Sommerfeld said.

Despite a glaring 5-0 throat-punching (Head Coach Todd Boren’s term) from Rockhurst, no one on the team feels like they deserve a losing record.

“I think that honestly we are one of the better teams in the Sunflower League and I think our record doesn’t show because of how well we’ve performed against a majority of our losses,” attacker Michael Filsinger said. “We should have beaten those teams but we couldn’t seem to put one in the back of the net. And that’s just been a struggle for us.”

Scoring has been a problem for the team this season even though the team has had ample opportunity to do so.

“In many of the losses that we’ve had, we have outshot opponents, we have created more chances on goal than our opponents, sometimes doubling the chances on goal of our opponents and we’re only putting one away,” Boren said. “On the flip side, defensively, we might only be giving up four or five shots a game but we’re letting two of those in. Overall when you only give up 4-5 looks on goal in a soccer game, that’s a game that you should win and we wound up losing a lot of those were we’re giving up 4-5 shots but creating upwards of 10-12 opportunities for ourselves and we’re losing those games 2-1. It’s almost like we’ve been shooting ourselves in our own foot in several of those losses.”

One problem was the the team letting goals in early in the game.

“The difficulty for us, and this happened to us a few times this year, was that when you’re playing a team like Shawnee Mission East who is a very strong team and you give up a silly goal to start with and then you’re instantly playing on your heels, you’re instantly trying to play catch up against a very difficult opponent it makes it hard to win those games,” Boren said.

When the team did score, they could not seem to finish opponents off.

“A lot of that is caused by us letting those teams hang around too long,” Filsinger said. “What would usually happen in the losses like when we played against SM East or Mill Valley they were just able to put their shots away and we just couldn’t do that and so we just couldn’t keep up with the way they were playing.”

At the tail end of his 13th year as the head coach of the Boys soccer team, Boren is unaccustomed to this kind of middling season.

“We’re usually like a 9-6-1 type of team, a 9-5-2 type of team. We’ve had seasons where we’ve put together as many as 13 wins but I’d say we’re kind of in that 9-11 win area,” Boren said. “So for us to be at 7-9, obviously from a win loss record, we didn’t, per say, hit the bar.”

In spite of the frustrating season, there is no sense of panic heading into regional play.

“We have the talent,” Boren said. “We have guys that can play. We have some very creative guys. Quite frankly at this point, if we get some balls to bounce our ways, because its literally been a season of inches this year, and when I say inches I mean we have literally missed winning games by inches, if we can figure out a way to get those things to fall in our favor, our guys can be very dangerous in the postseason. I don’t think there’s anybody out there who really wants to play us.”