The Emmaus girls soccer team put together what coach Rob Rooney considered to be its best outing of the season in a recent 3-0 win over Pleasant Valley. The win gave the team two straight victories, but the short streak was interrupted by Wilson West Lawn, who downed Emmaus 2-0 over the weekend.

"That was our best 80 minutes of soccer this season," said Rooney. "Until tonight, we hadn't played a good, consistent game of soccer; we'd be good for part of the game and then we'd get into some bad habits and just didn't put together a solid effort for an entire game. Hopefully, this is the start of a trend."

Freshman Sophie Pickering got her first goal of the season just over three minutes into the game against Pleasant Valley to open the scoring.

Jen Fritz and Peyton Ritter, both juniors, also tallied goals, while Ritter and Pickering both added assists. Meagan Snyder added an assist as well. Pickering's assist came on a rare double-assist with Krysti Schmidt, when both used a single touch to get the ball to Fritz and put the team up 2-0 with just over eight minutes left in the first-half.

"That's rare, you don't see that situation too often," said Rooney of the double assist. "You have to do things perfectly for that to happen."

Emmaus is 5-3-1 overall and 5-2-1 in the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference, putting them fourth in the Skyline Division, behind Whitehall (9-0 overall, 8-0 EPC), Parkland (8-2, 7-1) and Nazareth (8-1-1, 6-1-1).

Ritter leads the team with six goals this season, while goalkeepers Mackenzie McCann and Jessica Harnett have combined their efforts to post three shutouts and help Emmaus to outscore their opponents 25-13 through their first nine games.

"We're seeing some of our younger players developing and that's going to help us," said Rooney. "They've put in a lot of work to get to this point and they're going to keep getting better and that's going to help our consistency. Overall, I'm happy with where we're at as long as we continue to improve and don't backslide at all."

Now that they're into the second half of the season, they'll be able to gauge their improvement in rematches with teams that they played early in the first half.

In the next week, they'll face Whitehall and Central Catholic (7-3, 6-3) for the first time this season, but they also have rematches with Nazareth and Northampton.

Nazareth beat Emmaus 5-2 in their first meeting, but the Lady Hornets downed Northampton 3-1 when they first played. Emmaus also has a rematch with division rival Parkland coming up on October 4.

"One good thing about this new league [the EPC] is that there is a lot more competition," said Rooney. "There are some good teams that now a part of our league and they're having an impact. Stroudsburg and Pocono Mountain East are especially strong and that improves the overall competition.

"They're the type of teams that you like to play against, because they give you a good gauge of just how good you are and what you have to do to be better."