Westfield loses possession battle in home opener against Brookstone

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Issy Dehem (22) gets a shot off in the box with Brookstone’s Taylor Zwickey (27) trailing closely. (Clay Brown/HHJ)

PERRY — Westfield (2-2, 1-2 GIAA District 5-4A/3A) has had a tough last couple of games, the latest a 5-1 loss to Brookstone (5-1, 2-0 District) in Thursday’s home opener.

Tuesday’s road game was a 9-0 loss to the 2025 GIAA 4A state champion, St. Anne-Pacelli, and the Cougars were last year’s runner-up in the same classification.

“They’re a tough opponent, they [went to] state last year, they’re just strong,” Lady Hornets head coach Liana Walton said. “We knew they would be, I think it should have been a more competitive game and the score should have been closer.”

In the first three minutes of game time Issy Dehem put a shot on goal and single-handedly drove the ball half the length of the pitch for an attack that ended up fruitless. Outside of those possessions and a few more sprinkled throughout it was tough for the Lady Hornets to consistently get out on the attack.

Brookstone was aggressive pursuing possession in the midfield. As Walton put it, they were first to the ball not just in the middle but seemingly everywhere. If Westfield did get a long pass out for a counter-attack, the Lady Cougars quickly converged and ended those hopes.

Brookstone scored their first two goals roughly within 1:30 of each other. The first was the result of a kerfuffle that stayed in front of the Lady Hornets’ goal for far too long before a Lady Cougar snuck it into the goal.

The next was a tough shot from the right boundary that found itself buried in the left side of the net and Westfield down 2-0 with just seven minutes gone.

After the Lady Cougars made it 3-0, Dehem drew a penalty kick and put it dead center on the crossbar. Mariela Padilla followed through with the finish for Westfield’s lone score of the evening.

“We weren’t the first to the ball. We were allowing them to control and possess,” Walton said. “We weren’t communicating well. We did try to make some adjustments at halftime, which, it helped because they only scored one [in the] second half…We just made more mistakes than they did, and I tell them all the time, the team that makes the most mistakes will lose the game.”

Brookstone added one more before half and another five minutes into the second, but their offense saw much less success in the final 40 minutes.

Some of that Walton credited to halftime adjustments, and some of it was the Lady Cougars sending a couple handfuls of shots sailing over the goal.

Westfield’s offense was null in the second half, the possession battle skewing further in Brookstone’s way. Possession was the main point for Walton after the game.

“We’ve got to control the middle,” Walton said. “They had [5-foot-10 defender, Taylor Zwickey], she just controlled the middle. Every time the ball came down she was like a brick wall. We’ve got to do a better job with that…it’s all about passing and possessing, and if we can’t do that, we can’t win.”