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Glenwood finishes off Rifle, 4A season in second place with a dominant win

Jeff Caspersen
Post Independent Staff
Glenwood Springs, CO Colorado

RIFLE, Colorado ” You know you’re playing solid team soccer when you not only throw seven goals up on the scoreboard, but each of those seven goals comes from a different player.

That’s exactly what Glenwood Springs did at Rifle on Thursday, lighting up the host Bears early and often in a 7-3 boys soccer win.

Travis Whitman, Sydney Van Horn, Ryan Buchanan, Erik Pena, Fabian Tapia, Gerritt Brown and Javier Rodelas all found net with goals and Tapia racked up four assists as the Demons finished off a monstrous regular season at 11-3-1 overall and 9-2-1 in the 4A Western Slope League.



Glenwood finished just shy of a league title, matching champion Eagle Valley’s circuit ledger but coming up short due to the Demons’ 0-1-1 head-to-head performance against the Devils, who dropped their regular-season finale to Battle Mountain on Thursday.

Still, coach John Mount and his Glenwood players will take it.



“It feels good to get 11 wins,” he said. “It felt good wrapping up the year being on our A game.”

The Demons now await their first-round opponent in the 4A state playoffs, which will be determined when the Colorado High School Activities Association seeds the tournament brackets this weekend.

Glenwood is hoping for ” and should land ” a vastly better seed than it received in last year’s postseason, when the Demons drew the 32nd and final seed in 4A and faced eventual state champion Broomfield in the first round of the playoffs.

“Hopefully we won’t be playing Broomfield,” Demons goalkeeper Kurt Hartmann joked. “We’ll find out (this weekend). We should have a good game.”

Rifle wrapped its first season under coach Ryan Mahler with a two-goal effort from Pablo Salgado. The Bears, 4-8 in the 4A WSL and 4-11 overall, also had a Uriel Rodriguez-assisted goal from Jose Salazar.

It was a building year for Mahler and his side, who said goodbye to six seniors ” Anthony Bracamontes, Kyle Zumbrennen, Juan Toscano, Rodriguez, Salgado and his brother, Ricardo ” on Thursday.

“It was a good first year,” said Mahler, who plans on keeping his Bear players active with indoor ball in the winter and club ball in the spring. “It was a learning experience for me and a learning experience for the kids.”


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