After decisive wins over Allen and Dieruff to start the Lehigh Valley Conference portion of their schedule at 2-0, the Lady Hornet soccer team went up against conference rival Central Catholic and came away on the short end of a 2-1 score.

Last week also included a tough loss to one of the better soccer teams in the state from Neshaminy High School, who beat the Lady Hornets 5-1 at Memorial Field. On the season, Emmaus now stands at 2-2-1, with a 2-1 record in the LVC.

Emmaus easily routed both Allen and Dieruff by identical 9-0 scores, with senior Mandy McCarthy picking up two goals in the win over Allen and three in the win over Dieruff. Sophomore Jenny Fritz put two on the board against Dieruff. McCarthy also scored the team's only goal in the loss to Neshaminy and assisted on three goals against Allen.

In the early going against Central Catholic, Emmaus seemed a little sluggish as Central Catholic kept pressure on senior goalie Kay Gustafson throughout much of the first-half and got one past her late in the half to go up 1-0.

The Lady Hornets turned the tables in the second half and junior Megan Snyder scored about halfway through the second half to tie the game. Emmaus continued to pressure Central Catholic, but the Vikettes got a late goal to take a 2-1 edge and were able to hang on to collect the win.

"We're not at all unhappy with the way we played," said coach Rob Rooney. "Certainly not the way we wanted the game to turn out, but we believe we carried a lot of the play in this game. They have two very dangerous attacking players, so they were dangerous in the counter attack, but mostly we felt that we held a lot of the play and we just didn't do a good enough job of finishing opportunities that were presented to us and that's going to be a problem in this conference."

The game was marked by physical play throughout, with one yellow card being assessed to the Lady Hornets in the second-half. Rooney believes the play was simply in the spirit of the rivalry and familiarity between the two teams.

"Central always comes to play hard and I think both teams kind of take the game between these two schools pretty seriously," he said. "A lot of these kids have a lot of history together from youth soccer, so there's a lot of familiarity between the two teams."

The game was the first of the season for Emmaus on a grass field and came on the heels of playing two out of three games against teams that don't command the type of error-free play that Central Catholic does, but Rooney denied that coming off games against weaker conference competition or playing its first game of the season on a slower grass field was a factor.

"We're not excuse makers and whether we played the best team in the state on Saturday or the worst team, the fact of the matter is these guys are also coming off a game where they played Allen; they're dealing with the same thing we are," he said. "We just lost this game because we didn't finish the opportunities that we had."

While Rooney stopped short of saying that his team came out a little flat in the first-half, he stressed to his players that they weren't playing to their ability during his halftime talk and that led to a change in attitude in the second half.

"We didn't change anything," he said. "We talked to our team about playing the way we could and going at them. We felt the game was going our way and I knew we were going to get a goal, we just couldn't have predicted that they were going to get another goal and things would go the way that they did."

The Lady Hornets host Nazareth (4-0-1, 1-0-1) Wednesday and Whitehall (2-1-2, 1-1-0) Thursday. Next Tuesday, Emmaus faces another rivalry game at Parkland (2-0-1, 1-0-1) next Tuesday.