It’s a daunting task to open the season against the defending EPC and District 11 champions, but that was the way the schedule played out for Emmaus this season in girls soccer as the Hornets opened against Parkland last Friday.

Parkland got two goals from Brooke Schutter and one from Rachel Medlar to take a 3-1 win in the season opener.

The Lady Trojans dominated the first 35 minutes of the game, keeping Emmaus away from the goal and making sure that the play was primarily in front of the Emmaus net. As the game went on, Emmaus seemed to settle in and was able to mount more of an attack, while putting up a good defensive showing.

“I just told them to be confident in who we were,” said Hornet head coach Sarah Oswald about what she told her team at the half. “I think being the first game of the season and playing against Parkland, we were anxious. We were nervous and we didn’t really settle into the game until late in the first half.

“We were just defending for the first 35 minutes in the first half. We found some success when we could build into the attack in the last five minutes. In the second half, they did everything that we asked of them and more.”

Goalkeeper Jess Harnett made five saves, with most of them being anything but routine. The Emmaus defense also stiffened in the second half, which helped to limit the pressure on Harnett as she got some help in front of her.

“Jess was awesome today,” said Oswald. “she stepped up and made some saves today. She’s no longer that young freshman or sophomore keeper, she’s a junior who has been tending our net for the last two years and she needs to be a leader out there. I couldn’t ask for a better effort from her than what she gave today.”

Oswald came into the season wanting her team to be more aggressive offensively rather than simply waiting for opportunities to present themselves.

The tougher offensive effort showed in the second half when the Hornets were able to get more chances to put the ball on net.

“If you can take a step back from what the actual score was, I think that we were really competitive on the field with them and I think we did some really good things,” Oswald said. “There are things to work on, but it’s early in the season and if that’s the effort that they’re going to put out there, we can grow off of that and fix the mistakes. We want to be good in October.”

Junior forward Krysti Schmidt came through with Emmaus’ first goal of the season with 11:21 to play in the game, firing a shot past Julia Buchman to make it a 2-1 game.

The goal pushed the energy level much higher for the Hornets as they fought to try to tie the score, but Schutter picked up her second goal of the game with 3:39 left to stretch Parkland’s lead back to two goals.

Emmaus plays at Northampton (0-1, 1-1) Wednesday before hosting Whitehall (1-0, 1-0) Friday and a nonconference game against Wilson West Lawn (0-0, 1-0) on Saturday. Nazareth (0-0) will be at Emmaus next Tuesday afternoon.