On a windy, rainy, chilly Wednesday evening it was IMS who advanced to the substate final with a 3-1 win over rival Mid-Prairie. Iowa Mennonite got the scoring started first with a Nick Yoder goal in the 18th minute and made it 2-0 when Dillon Bender found the back of the net in the 38th minute. After the game IMS Head Coach Marcus Miller talked about the offensive game plan and the number of quality chances his team had

“What we saw, going back two games before the Mid-Prairie game was we were doing a good job of possessing the ball, and it was like we were looking for the perfect shot, and perfect shots don’t exist, like in our game against Holy Trinity we took two shots all game, and you can’t win a game with that, so we just worked on taking more shots, shots from a distance and taking the far post run.”

Both defenses controlled the opening minutes of the second half until Reggie Hostedler broke through the Golden Hawk defense with a hustle goal beating multiple defenders before finishing at the goal to make the score 3-0. The Hawks got one the board late with an Austin Errthum goal in the 72nd minute. After the game Mid-Prairie Head Coach Pat Cady talked about what made the difference in the match.

“We definitely were getting out hustled in the first half, you have to play harder, you have to play smarted, they were dropping back pretty good when we were trying to attack, and when they won the ball, they were converting it into offense faster than we were converting into defense so they would gain an advantage and push it up the field harder,” Cady said. “We didn’t communicate well enough on the first goal they played the ball outside then had three guys in the middle, our middle wasn’t asking for help, they did a good job of playing the ball into there, it was just kind of overwhelming, they got that first goal in there. You know that first one didn’t bother us that much, we still had the possibility of getting something created, and then we made a second mistake, they capitalized on it and they played a lot better soccer than we played tonight.”

With the loss Mid-Prairie ends their season at 8-3-2. #6 IMS is now 14-6-1. They will next be in action Saturday at noon at Iowa City Regina who was a 10-0 winner over Highland last night. Regina won their match up with IMS earlier this season 3-0. The winner of Saturday’s contest will earn a berth at the state tournament In Des Moines.