Jim Walker
jim.walker@irontontribune.com

When you just want to sleep in on Saturday morning and it’s so hard to get your motor running, the St. Joseph Lady Flyers finally got started and then their engines started humming.
And the chief mechanic for the Lady Flyers was Laiken Unger who help drive her team to a 4-1 non-league soccer win over the Fairland Lady Dragons on Saturday.
“The game wasn’t pretty but, in the end, we got the result we needed,” said Lady Flyers’ coach Dan Blair who was celebrating his 72nd birthday.
“Laiken had a great game today. She was involved in every goal either by assisting or scoring the goal.”
The game was scoreless until the 26-minute mark of the first half when Unger steered a direct ball through to Emma Whaley who scored to put the Lady Flyers up 1-0.
Four minutes later, Unger was at the wheel again only this time she made a perfect corner kick that Aubrey “Killer” Sutton chested into the net for the second goal of the game.
Fairland then scored to get within 2-1 at the 19:40 mark and the score remained that way until the second half.
With 28 minutes on the clock in the second half, Unger scored from the 25-yard line off a cross from Sutton and it was 3-1.
The game stayed in the midfield range until Unger scored as she found the back of the net from 30 yards away on a free kick with 46 seconds left.
“Laiken had so much spin on the ball that it hit the goalkeeper’s hand, bounced off and still made it into the net,” said Blair.
The Lady Flyers’ goalkeeper Riley Daniels had 10 saves. Fairland’s Jordy Taylor finished with eight saves.
St. Joseph (8-3, 4-3) host Northwest on Wednesday in a Southern Ohio Conference game.