The final week of the regular season is meaningless as far as any post season implications are concerned for the Barton men’s soccer team.
But finishing those two games – games the Cougars are expected to win – with some momentum is big for Barton.
The Cougars won the first of those two games Wednesday at Dodge City, defeating the Conquistadors by a 3-1 margin.
“Right now we approach every game like it is the playoffs right now,” Coach Mike Brown said. “Our players had the attitude we were not going to lose that game. They had belief in each other. Even when Dodge scored, we didn’t panic.”
With the win, Barton is now 11-2 overall and 6-2 in the Jayhawk West. The Cougars are 9-2 in the western half of Region VI. Dodge is 4-8-2 overall and 4-5-1 in the region.
“It was a tough, hard fought game,” Coach Brown said. “We knew it would be. Dodge was in that playoff mode to lock up a seed. We were on the road, under the lights, their fans were going – you know all those factors were against us. That’s late October soccer.”
Barton is locked into second place in the West. That will give the Cougars a home playoff game Thursday against Kansas City Kansas.
KCK and Cowley will most likely end tied for that second spot in the East but Cowley holds the tiebreaker. That would give KCK the third seed and a trip to Great Bend and the Barton Sports Complex to take on the Cougars.
Should the Cougars win that opener they would most likely travel to Johnson County for a second round against the East winner Johnson. Johnson would open play against the West fourth seed – most likely Garden City. Should that West fourth seed win, the game would be played at Barton.
Back to play Wednesday. Barton took an early 1-0 lead when Vinicius Monteiro scored just 11 minutes into the contest.
Barton increased it to 2-0 late in the first half when Mario Ramirez scored on Lucas Alves second assist of the contest with just more than 10 minutes to play in the half.
“We played a great first half, probably our best half of soccer we played all year,” Coach Brown said. “We came out and executed nearly perfectly that first half.”
Dodge City made things interesting with 30 minutes to play when Jamie Scott cut the lead to 2-1.
The game stayed at 2-1 until the final seconds of the contest when Ramirez scored his second goal of the game to lock up the win.
Barton will wrap up the regular season at home Saturday when Northwest Tech pays a visit to the Barton Sports Complex for a 3 pm kickoff.

Barton 3, Dodge City 1
Barton 2 1 – 3
Dodge 0 1 – 1
Barton – Vinicius Monteiro (Lucas Alves), 11:05
Barton – Mario Ramirez (Alves), 34:37
Dodge – Jamie Scott (Isaac Palma), 60:06
Barton – Ramirez (Sergio Ribeiro, Monteiro), 89:45