After starting the season 6-0 and as the number one ranked team in the state, the Little Hawks saw their perfect start to the season come crashing down against West High at the University of Iowa Soccer Complex on Friday night. It was City’s first regular season loss since May 15, 2015 when City High lost to Linn-Mar at home. The Little Hawks hope that they can use this as motivation going forward.

“If anything, it’s just more motivation for us to train harder in practice, to focus more in games and learn our mistakes that we make and fix those,” captain Jonah Dancer ’18 said.

City High got off to a good start, controlling a lot of possession early and getting more shots on goal than the Trojans in the early going. Things would start to get more level as the half progressed, but City was able to get maybe its best look of the half on a cross that fell just out of the reach of a sliding Rasmus Schlutter ’17. City High head coach, Jose Fajardo, believes that City’s inability to finish many good scoring chances has plagued the Little Hawks this week, and believes that it allowed Washington to stay in the game longer than the Warriors would’ve otherwise been able to during the Little Hawk’s game on Tuesday.

“Today, if we finish the shots we had in the first half, it’s no game,” Fajardo said. “It’s not how many chances you get, but how many chances you put away and they were more effective than us today.”

West High was able to break the scoreless deadlock on a goal with about half an hour left to play when Nicholas Raley ’17 was able to get the ball past City High goalie Sam Tomek ’17, clanging it in off of the post. It was all the Trojans would need to knock off the Little Hawks for the first time since 2013. Fajardo says believes that this loss is a turning point, as well as a life lesson, now that City High will fall from the top spot in the next rankings.

“Now we have to get our butts on the field again and get ready to go back to number one,” Fajardo said. “If we want to be state champions, if we want to be good at anything we do, not only here but in life, we have to have that pressure [of being unbeaten and being number one] on our shoulders.”