It hasn’t come together yet for the New Hope-Solebury girls soccer team.
But New Hope senior Madi Fasti is confident that it will.
“It’s the beginning of the season,” Fasti said. “We have time. We’ll work it out. We’re struggling now, but I’m really excited for the rest of the season. I think we can improve a lot.”
New Hope fell to Lower Moreland, 3-0, on Tuesday in a Suburban One League Freedom Division contest at Lower Moreland’s Valley Center Park.
It was the first win of the year for Lower Moreland.
The loss drops New Hope to 0-2 in conference play and 0-3 for the season. The Lions still seek to score their first goal of the 2021 campaign.
Fasti, the point guard on the New Hope basketball team, just joined the team and the Lower Moreland game was her first. A senior, she played soccer for years, but had given it up to focus on basketball.
“A lot of my friends are on the team and they wanted me to join, so I did,” she said. “It’s nice to be playing soccer again. I’d played with a lot of these girls growing up and they convinced me that we should play together one last time and I’m glad they did.
“I’m enjoying it so far and it will keep me in shape for basketball. I knew everyone on the team and they accepted me right away. That’s the beauty of a small school.”
Fasti brings an outsider’s perspective to the team.
“I think we’re all quick,” she said. “We can all handle the ball and get it up the field. We need to work on communicating and playing together.
“We’re off to a slow start and this happened to my basketball team, many times. We had some losses in the beginning of the year last year but we ended up winning our division and the district championship. The key is to stay positive. We have to stay together. If we don’t stay together, we won’t work well together.”
Fasti spent her freshman year at Archbishop Wood before transferring to New Hope.
“I went there for basketball because that’s such a big basketball school, but I decided I really wanted to go to New Hope,” she said. “That was a good decision for me.
“I’m really excited for the rest of the season. I think we can improve a lot.”
Derek Antonini is in his second season as New Hope’s head coach.
“We have a bad goal differential right now,” he said. “We’ve let in 11 goals and haven’t scored any in three games, and obviously that has to change.
“I feel that we’ve possessed the ball more than the other teams, but we’re not scoring. It’s very frustrating to me that we can’t put a full match together. We can hold the ball for 60-70 percent, we can get some good runs in but nothing’s going in. Then the other team gets the ball for maybe 20 seconds and it comes into our goal.
“But I also think it’s fixable. Our team needs to find an edge, dig in and learn how to be a unit. Once we do that, I think things will start to fall into place for us.”
New Hope is back in action on Friday, when the Lions play host to William Tennent in an SOL Freedom game at 3:30 p.m.
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