Sports
De Smet stays hot with 8-1 rout of Whitfield
Kabadeh leads offensive surge for 6-1 Spartans with three goals; Hail, Boersig score twice sending two-time defending Class 1 state champs to 2-4
A well-oiled machine known as soccer continues to impress in the early-season.
Prince Kabadeh scored three times, Brian Hail had two goals and an assist and Cameron Boersig netted two goals as the Spartans had six players with multiple points in an 8-1 rout of Monday at De Smet High School.
The Spartans (6-1) also got a goal and two assists from Louie Berra and Dominic Berra and B.J. Tucker each collected two assists in helping De Smet to its third win in a row.
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"This is a veteran crew. These are three-and four-year varsity players," De Smet coach Greg Vitello said of his team. "They've been through our system. It's kind of like club teams that have been playing together for five or six or seven years. These guys have been together for three and four years and it really helps. In practice, there's not a whole lot of stuff that we have to explain. They pretty much know. We're not doing anything different than I did 20 years ago."
The Spartans built a 4-1 halftime lead before netting four more goals off Whitfield goalkeeper Tony Minorini, who faced 17 shots on goal, stopping nine.
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"They're a little down, and (Whitfield coach Bill Daues' team's) really young, too," Vitello said of the two-time defending Class 1 state champion Warriors, who fell to 2-4 on the season. "The combination of them being down and young and our combination against them wasn't real good for them."
Whitfield got its lone goal from Nick Tobias, his team-leading fourth of the season, but it was Kabadeh and Louie Berra leading the way offensively for the Spartans again. Kabadeh doubled his goal total to six, while Berra now has six goals and six assists in seven games.
"He's the engine that kind of makes us go," Vitello said of Berra. "When he's on, we're really really good, and when he's not, then somebody else has to pick it up. He's been on pretty much all season so far.
"We tried to emphasize keeping the ball on the ground with our passes, kind of move away from dribbling and look for one-two's and various things like that. Just passing and try to keep the ball moving."
De Smet will play host to Fort Zumwalt South Wednesday at 6 p.m. Whitfield continues to play a rigorous schedule, this time going on the Illinois side of the river to play at Edwardsville Wednesday at 7 p.m.