COLLEGE SOCCER: King men surprise new league rival

At least in men’s soccer, Lees-McRae and King College have this new conference rivalry thing down pat.

The Tornado scored a pair of early goals and then survived a late ejection to hold on for a 4-3 win Wednesday in a testy matchup with the defending Conference Carolinas champions and 2009 NCAA Division II national finalists.

The King athletic department is in its first year as a full member of Conference Carolinas – the school’s first NCAA D-II league – and Lees-McRae, located just across the North Carolina border, is by far the closest CC school geographically to Bristol.

“It’s always been a good rivalry – we’ve played them the last few years as well,” said King senior captain Tom Winspear, who recorded a hat trick Wednesday and assisted on the only Tornado goal he didn’t personally put in the back of the net. “It’s going to continue into this conference. They’re a good team; we’re a good team. We’ll see who comes out on top each year.”

In round one, it was surprisingly the Tornado.

King opened its first Conference Carolinas slate Saturday with a 4-1 thumping courtesy of preseason league favorite Limestone and entered Wednesday’s matchup winless on the 2011 season.

On the other hand, Lees-McRae – despite a new-look lineup that featured seven freshman starters against King – was picked was picked to finish second in the 2011 preseason CC rankings. In addition to their recent conference and national success, the Bobcats (3-2-0, 1-1-0) also had defeated King by an aggregate 7-1 score in two wins over the Tornado when the teams met for non-conference games the past two seasons.

But it took King (1-2-1, 1-1-0) just three minutes to strike first on Wednesday when Sam Nicol found Winspear open in front of the goal for his first score of the season.

A mere six minutes later, Winspear, King’s leading scorer in 2010, lobbed a perfect cross to the head of Zack Caracciolo, who redirected the ball into the upper left corner to give King a 2-0 advantage.

“We’ve got the confidence and believe in what we do and it showed,” Winspear said.

Those two quick goals, however, were just the start of a wild evening at Parks Field.

In addition to the seven combined goals by the two teams, the match also featured two penalty kicks (a Lees-McRae chance saved by King goalkeeper Patrick Milfeld and a King opportunity converted by Winspear), six yellow cards and one melee midway through the second half that led to the ejection of King defender Joshua Feener.

Tensions boiled over away from the ball when Tornado sophomore David Eagan shoved Lees-McRae’s Nick Welsh after the two had been jawing as they jogged up the field. Both wound up with yellow cards and in the ensuing skirmish, Feener was sent off when the referee saw him kick a defenseless Bobcats player.

Forced to play with only 10 men for the rest of the night and clinging to a 3-1 advantage with just more than 20 minutes remaining, King seemingly secured the match five minutes later when Winspear rocketed in his penalty kick after Joe Mayer had been taken down in the box.

James Smith, however, scored for the Bobcats in the 83^rd minute to pull Lees-McRae within two and then James Galvani added another Lees-McRae tally when he broke free in the 88^th minute.

The match ended with Milfeld and Lees-McRae senior Luke Duffy colliding in the King box after a last-gasp long ball slipped over the entire King defense, leaving Milfeld to charge out to save the day as the buzzer sounded.

The ending to the game was nearly identical to the waning minutes of the first half, except Winspear put his chance on a long clearance from King defender Zachary Clark into the back of the net with just 21 seconds remaining in the opening 45 minutes, putting King back up by two goals after David Palmer had scored in the 30^th minute for the Bobcats.

King coach Louis Thorpe aptly summed up his team’s eventful upset Wednesday.

“I’m not going to call us champions,” Thorpe said, “but it’s going to be entertaining to watch us play.

“If you watch us play, you’re going to really have fun.”

WOMEN

Lees-McRae 4, King 0

Although the Tornado women weren’t able to improve much on the scoreboard from their 5-0 loss to Limestone in their Conference Carolinas opener, King coach Simon Duffy was in much better spirits after Wednesday’s match.

“It’s night and day,” Duffy said. “The two things I think a player can control are her effort and attitude. That’s all I’m asking.”

“I can take positives from this game, I absolutely can,” he added. “I don’t like losing – don’t get me wrong – but there’s a way to go about playing the game and I was much happier with today’s performance.”

King (1-3-0, 0-2-0) failed to get much offense going for the second straight match – getting outshot by the Bobcats 35-9 and recording just two attempts on goal – but the Tornado trailed just 1-0 at halftime after Meagan Thornton scored for Lees-McRae when she took a short corner kick and blasted the ball into the net.

Bobcats midfielder Brooke Santerre then put King back on its heels when she ripped in a chance off a free kick just one minute into the second half, but the score would stay 2-0 until the game’s final five minutes when MaryBeth Sullivan turned it into a rout with two late goals for Lees-McRae (2-2-0, 2-0-0).

“She hit it as true as you can hit it,” Duffy said about Santerre’s demoralizing strike. “It was tough straight off to start the second half dealing with that, but I thought we did well considering that.”

The Bobcats, picked third in the CC preseason rankings, now have the early lead atop the league standings.

The King men and women will each hit the road for three Conference Carolinas matches before returning home Oct. 1 to take on St. Andrews.

nhubbard@bristolnews.com | Twitter: @Hubbard_BHCSprt | (276) 645-2543