Shue strikes twice early, North Penn beats Hatboro-Horsham

HORSHAM >> As Hatboro-Horsham and North Penn met to close out the regular season, both boys soccer teams had goals they wanted to accomplish coming out of Wednesday afternoon’s Suburban One League Continental Conference finale.

For Hatboro-Horsham, it entered the game with seven wins on the season, a win against the Knights would double the Hatters’ win total from a year ago.

“We wanted to finish our season on a positive note,” Hatboro-Horsham coach Kyle McGrath said. “If we would have won today we would have doubled our win total from last year so that was kind of a goal we set at the beginning of the year.”

For North Penn, it hit a rough patch over the past two or so weeks, so it looked to grab a win and smooth over some continuity issues.

“We wanted to get a little momentum doing towards the playoffs,” North Penn coach Paul Duddy said. “The last 10-12 days we got a win out of one, but we’re just not connecting well, some basics.”

It was the Knights that capped their regular season with a win as it played well in all phases of the game as they won the game convincingly 4-1.

North Penn (12-4-2, 9-3-2 SOL Continental) wasted no time getting started, as defenseman Kyle

Shue scored less than a minute into the game. Shue was not finished, netting the second goal of the contest off a corner from Nate Baxter to give the Knights a 2-0 lead less than two minutes into the game.

“That’s huge in soccer,” said Duddy of the Knights’ fast start. “The first goal is statistically a big deal.”

Joe LaRoche got the Hatters (7-11-0, 5-9-0) on the board late in the first half to cut the North Penn lead to 2-1. The goal by LaRoche sparked the Hatters as they finished the first half strong and came out energized in the second half.

Although the Hatters started the second half taking the pace of play to North Penn, the size of the Knights wore down the Hatboro-Horsham defensively and gave them an advantage offensively winning jump balls.

North Pen grabbed its two second-half goals off headers. On the first, Owen Nakatani banged home a cross from Noah Kwortnik and the second came when Kwortnik hammered the ball in off corner set by Nick Terchek

“We got our defenders up into the attacking third and all four goals came from our defense,” Duddy said.

North Penn now focuses its attention towards the District 1-AAA playoffs as it sits and awaits its fate to see whom the Knights take on in the first round Tuesday.