By BAKER ELLIS / Sports Editor

ALABASTER – In a game that stated at 1:30 p.m. on April 8 and had close to 1,000 people in attendance, mostly in the form of students from the Thompson Sixth Grade Center and the Thompson Intermediate School, the Thompson Warriors welcomed in the visiting Chelsea Hornets for a Friday afternoon contest. The 7A No. 9 Warriors beat Chelsea easily by a 3-0 finish to move to 11-8-1 on the year.

“Overall I thought we did well to sort of handle the occasion,” Thompson head coach Rusty Cowley said after the game. “For a lot high school kids they’re going to play in front of a few hundred people, let alone almost a thousand. We came out and started really quickly, when you’re able to get a goal a minute in, that’s always going to be huge. And after that we did well to sort of keep the pressure on.”

Sophomore Kenny Rodriguez found the back of the net twice early in the first half before adding his third goal of the first half in the 38^th minute, scoring all three goals for the Warriors in the first half of the game. While the entirety of the scoring game from the first half, Cowley still felt his team played better in the second.

“I definitely think we were more comfortable in the second half,” Cowley added. “In the first half I don’t think the score was an indication of how the game went.”

In the second half the attacking combination of Rodriguez, Diego Gutierrez and Daniel Basave combined to cause all sorts of problems for the Hornet defensive line, combining for a number of looks in the second half. The best look for Chelsea came in the 70^th minute when Miles Sharp played a ball into Eli Alexander, but the Abel Perez, the Thompson keeper, came flying out of his box to deny the chance and keep the clean sheet.

Thompson advanced to 11-8-1 on the year with the win while Chelsea fell to 7-8-3.