Rick McCarthy is having a great start to his college soccer career.

Five days after scoring in the Warriors' exhibition game against #6 UC Santa Barbara, the freshman from Harbor Springs, Michigan provided the winning goal in the season opener for Westmont (1-0). The game, played against Trinity Western of British Columbia (0-2), was contested at Azusa Pacific as a part of the Cougar Classic.

"It wasn't a great performance by any stretch – kind of an uneven and choppy game. But we came away with one and I guess at this point we will be satisfied with that," said Westmont head coach Dave Wolf.

In the nineteenth minute of the game, junior Zach George threw the ball in from the left-hand sideline near the top of the box.

"They didn't do a great job of dealing with the long throw from Zach," said Wolf. "The ball skipped through to Rick and he hit a low hard left-footed shot."

The successful George-to-McCarthy combination would stand as the only goal of the game, giving the Warriors a 1-0 victory.

"Unfortunately, Rick had to go off later in the game," reported Wolf. "He has a bit of a knee injury that we are concerned about. We don't think he has any ligament damage, but he definitely has some trouble in his knee. That was an unfortunate part of the game for us."

Sophomore keeper Matt McNab picked up the sixth shutout of his career, although he was not awarded a save since none of the Spartans' six shots were on goal.

"Trinity did have one ball off the cross bar that was a good chance and we were fortunate to survive that," noted Wolf. "I thought we handled situations well where they got around our box. They definitely penetrated into our final third at times, but I thought the guys did a good job of scrambling, covering for each other, hunting down loose balls and getting stuff cleared out of the box. I think that was one of the reasons that they weren't able to get a lot of shots off."

The Warriors will return to Azusa on Saturday to play William Jessup at 2:30 p.m.