Crystal Garcia’s hat trick leads Mendota past La Salle-Peru

On a cold blustery day, the Mendota girls soccer team was slow out of the gate, but a strong second half led to a 5-2 nonconference victory over La Salle-Peru on Monday at the L-P Sports Complex in La Salle.

Things appeared to start off really bad for the Cavaliers as Laylie Denault broke free just 16 seconds into the contest and looked to have made it 1-0 Trojans, but was ruled to be offsides on the play.

Guadalupe Sandoval made a couple of nice stops for the Mendota defense to keep the game scoreless. Seven minutes into the game, the Cavaliers missed the chance to clear the ball, but Denault was unable to put the Trojans on the board.

Amelia Buckley did a nice job for the L-P defense preventing the Trojans scoring.

Mendota had another chance when Briza Cervantes made a pass to Ella Coss, but Coss was unable to find the net.

But at the 19:44 mark of the first half, L-P was whistled for a penalty, which sent Crystal Garcia up for the penalty kick, and she was able to put the Trojans ahead 1-0.

A minute later, Garcia had a breakaway, but a great save by Lily Higgins kept the score 1-0.

“Lily [Higgins] has done a really nice job for us,” L-P coach Christin Pappas said. “She had 39 saves in a game this year, which is a program record, and I thought for the most part she did a really nice job again for us today.”

About a minute later, however, Coss passed to Garcia, who made it 2-0 Mendota with her second goal of the game.

Vicky Tejada nearly put L-P on the board with a free kick, but the ball hit the crossbar and kept L-P off the board.

But just over a minute later, Ameilia Buckley found a hole in the middle of the Trojans defense to cut the L-P deficit to 2-1.

In the second half, neither team started out strong on offense.

However, at the 23:37 mark, Noemi Arteaga found the net from about 20 yards out to make it 3-1 Trojans.

Mendota made it 4-1 with 17:21 left when Elaina Reddin connected from about 30 yards out.

With about 15 minutes left, L-P’s Rosalie Leininger was able to settle the ball down in front of the net, then put the shot in to make it 4-2 Mendota.

But with just 36 seconds left in the contest, Garcia picked up her third goal of the game and 10th of the season to finish the game and give the Trojans the 5-2 victory.

“Crystal [Garcia] is having a nice season with 10 goals in five games,” Mendota coach Nick Myers said. “By now everyone knows about her and she’s been solid. Team-wise, we start out slow in the first half and then turn things up in the second half. I wish we could start out strong, as well, but we definitely make the adjustments at halftime and play well to end the game.”