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The Morristown East girls soccer team struck early on Thursday night, and they struck often.

Kirsten Sadlon scored in just the third minute to put the Lady ‘Canes on top, and turned in two more to complete her hat trick in just the 16th minute. She finished with a staggering seven goals on the evening.

“Kirsten Sadlon is just extraordinary,” East head coach Michael Joy said. “She was at 17 goals coming into today, so she’s at 24 goals and we’re not even halfway through the season. She’s going to break all kinds of records, if she’s not first team All-State, there’s something wrong. I coached college for 26 years and I told my former assistant who’s now the head coach at Tusculum, ‘You better get out here and watch’. LMU was out here watching her the other day, she’s going to draw a lot of interest as a player. She’s extraordinary, our team is fortunate to have her.”

Humble in her success, Sadlon had praise for her teammates after the game.

“Honestly I just feel really great with how the team performed,” Sadlon said. “We were really connecting passes well, they were finding space and they were taking numbers off me which allowed me to score.”

Aside from the prolific goal scoring, the most impressive aspect of the win for the Lady ‘Canes was their intensity from front to back.

Many teams let up when they get out to a lead, particularly one of the magnitude of East’s on Thursday, but not the Lady ‘Canes.

They maintained a frenetic defensive pace all 67 minutes, thanks in large part to the vocal leadership of Sadlon’s co-captain Haley Baskette.

“She’s a real strong player for us, and the nice thing about Haley is that she’s a leader, and a vocal one at that,” Joy said. “She’ll be the one out there talking and organizing. She’s so coachable as well. I play Alexa Montalvo who’s a senior for us in the back, she’s got more pace than any of my other defenders so she can clean everything up back there, and she allows Haley to get more touches on the ball because she’s a strong physical player that you want to be able to support in the middle. So she and Kirtsen are both our captains.”

Thursday was East’s final tune-up before hopping into district play on Tuesday when they’ll host Jefferson County.

Coach Joy is happy with where his team is at heading into this stretch of the season.

“We’re real good,” Joy said. “We’re missing one of our starters who will be back with us on Monday, so it gave some of our girls some opportunity today. What our team needs to do is build depth, so we got a lot of girls in today. We have a lot of players who are new to the game, so we have to work with them a lot technically to get them up to speed, but they’re really developing. They work extremely hard.”

Jefferson County won the district a year ago, but this is a different ‘Canes team than the Lady Patriots have seen in years past.

Kickoff is set for 6:30 on Tuesday. Sadlon is looking forward to it.

“I think we’re feeling good. Obviously Jeff is a very good team, we’re going to go into it respecting our opponent, but we’re planning on doing great things in that game,” Sadlon said. “Just playing our style of play, staying calm and hopefully getting the win.”