Bulldogs open season against Lewis & Clark

PERKINSTON – The 2015 Mississippi Gulf Coast men's soccer season starts Saturday in Raymond, when the Bulldogs take on Lewis & Clark Community College at 5 p.m.

The Trailblazers, from Godfrey, Ill., play Hinds there Friday night.

But for the Bulldogs, the focus will be on cleaning up things they've worked on since beating Holmes 3-1 last week.

"We've changed a ton since the scrimmage, very detail-oriented stuff, so I want to see those things," coach Chris Handy said. "It's also important for them to play well against an out-of-state team. That will be a big challenge for them."

He said the team has showed more flashes of the good things than the bad things he was seeing earlier.

Tapering down the tough preseason camp schedule to regular-season game preparation should also help.

"We've put in a ton of work," Handy said. "I think this is the toughest preseason we've had. The amount of running we've put in, the amount of stuff we've put in and the amount of new guys, that makes for some long days."

Gulf Coast has 18 new players on the roster, counting freshmen and transfers, so building chemistry has been an important part of the preparations. That chemistry affects everything from interplay between two players in small areas to tactical across the field.

The community-college roster turnover means those issues sometimes get worked out on the fly, even to the level or scrapping the basic formation. Handy hasn't seen anything to merit large changes so far, however.

"I think we're heading in the right direction," he said. "We've got a nice base to start from. Junior college teams change so much from beginning to end. We've got our beginning in and we'll have to see what happens at the end."