OBERLIN — A knee injury against Lakewood sidelined Lake Ridge Academy forward Sami Ibrahim in the middle of the soccer season. Since his return, he’s shown the Lions what they were missing.
Ibrahim continued his scoring binge Thursday with four goals in Lake Ridge’s 6-0 road victory over Oberlin. In three games since his return, Ibrahim has scored nine goals.
“He scored two goals this past Saturday in Toledo,” said Lake Ridge coach Ryan MacRaild. “He scored two goals and two assists against Lutheran West on Monday and today was kind of the icing on the cake. He has been coming on well, which is good because that takes some of the pressure off our other forwards to get some opportunities.”
“They’re just a much better team,” Oberlin coach Dan LaBianca said. “Top-to-bottom, their players are better, they’re more disciplined. They work harder. It was the best team we’ve seen so far. We’re a young team, so we find it difficult to defend at times. They could have scored 10, 12 goals on us.”
Ibrahim initiated the scoring with a goal in the eighth minute. Lake Ridge (10-2-1) pulled Oberlin’s (5-5-4) goalkeeper, Josh Kocsis, away from the net with a shot. After Kocsis made the save, the rebound caromed right to Ibrahim. The Lake Ridge junior sent a shot to the back of the net.
The Lions added to their lead seven minutes later when Ibrahim out-ran a defender, took the ball toward the net and rifled another shot across the goal line. His third goal came on a header following a corner kick.
“We have pretty good control of the ball,” MacRaild said. “We practice a lot of first-touch and second-touch and really work to move the ball around. Some of the boys actually came last night to watch the Oberlin-Wellington game. They realized that our wings matched up pretty well against theirs, so we could get some movement down into the corners. We took advantage of that.”
Ibrahim scored his fourth and final goal in the 50th minute. He took a pass in front of the net and put the shot away for the goal.
If the past week is any indication, Ibrahim is getting healthy at the right time. With the playoffs looming, being able to consistently use Ibrahim in long spurts will be a key for Lake Ridge.
“I’ve been out for maybe two or three games,” Ibrahim said. “I’ve been keeping in shape while my knee’s been injured, so I’ve been up-to-date with everything. It’s good to score a lot of goals after coming back from an injury.
“We’re a pretty confident team. We’ve beaten all the teams in our district, so we’re obviously going to be the first seed. We’re hoping to get really far this year, a lot farther than last year, which was the regional semifinal. We have the chance.”
Contact Matt Florjancic at 329-7135 or ctsports@chroniclet.com.

Lake Ridge 6, Oberlin 0

GOALS: (LR) Sami Ibrahim 4, Rhett Cross, Dan Lee 1.
SHOTS ON GOAL: Lake Ridge 15, Oberlin 3.
SAVES: (LR) Dom Velloze 2, Neilay Shah 1; (O) Josh Kocsis 9.
CORNER KICKS: Lake Ridge 6, Oberlin 3.
YELLOW CARDS: (O) Erickson Andrews.
HALFTIME: Lake Ridge, 3-0.

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