The Washington Spirit fell 0-1 to the North Carolina Courage on Saturday night in front of the fourth largest home crowd in Spirit history.  After the match, Interim Head Coach Adrián González, Hal Hershfelt, and Tara McKeown spoke with the media.

Adrián González

On the way the team dealt with North Carolina keeping their wingers high and wide to occupy the fullbacks:

“Well, I think today, we hadn’t had the game that we were expecting. We need to take this game as a learning experience. I think behind every game there is learning, especially when you lose, and we need to identify what happened today. Right now, the feeling that I have is that we knew that they wanted to progress through the middle. They wanted to create numbers inside. Dropping their nine with (Ashley) Sanchez, with two midfielders, sometimes also with a fullback there inside. We knew that that would happen. That and I think we haven’t adjusted properly. Especially during the first half and then second half I think we had a lot of performance. Again, not too many chances today but even though we didn’t have the best game today, we could’ve scored at least one, I think, but if we see the big picture I think we need to be honest. I think today we didn’t deserve a victory. When we created chances other games, I said like, ‘Okay, maybe we could’ve scored more goals and maybe we could’ve had better results.’ Today, my feeling is we haven’t had what we wanted, and it wasn’t enough. Maybe we could tie today because you push until the end. The team, they have been working hard until the end, but I think today we needed to do much more to win a game. We’ve done that during many, many games, but this week we couldn’t, and we need to learn from that.”

On the reshuffling of positions on the field:

“We wanted Makenna (Morris) on the left side, but we were expecting because we didn’t know about Casey (Kreuger), if she could continue or not. So, just in case Casey couldn’t continue, we were expecting to put Makenna there, so that’s why she was a little bit confused with Trin (Trinity Rodman) there, but we wanted to have Makenna on left side and Trin more as a nine with Hatchy (Ashley Hatch). Two forwards and trying to thread behind because we knew especially behind the fullbacks and center backs, we could’ve had more advantage, but I think today we couldn’t find those walls and those spaces.”

On the impact Andi Sullivan not playing had on the team’s performance:

“Huge. Huge impact. She’s a player that brings leadership, brings patience for the buildup, during the buildup, she’s helping us a lot. Also, defensively she has the ability to organize the team and when things are not going good, or as we were expecting, she’s the first one who always takes that step forward and today for sure we missed her. We need to learn, and we need to be able to do that also with all the players as a team. We need to have also that ambition and also that leadership with all the players on the pitch because sometimes things are not as you were expecting, and we need to be ready to face those situations, too. Yesterday, the last training session, she fell a little bit. Her hip again, and at this point, it doesn’t make sense to push any player, I think. We have that summer break and thinking about next game, we want the players as fresh as possible, and that’s why we decided today to give her a rest because she needed it. Of course, we have other players that also are competing good and that’s why we couldn’t play today with her.”

On what they will do improve communication between the midfield and the forwards:

“Well, we’ve been talking about, especially in the middle today we couldn’t find, especially Hal and Paige Metayer behind the forwards. We’ve been working on that this week and other games. During the buildup, we could find those players and those spaces much better. Once you find those players there, your attack is better because you can progress and then you can find maybe Croix (Bethune) or Courtney (Brown) in those pockets. Today, we knew that they had a lot of players in the middle. It wasn’t easy to progress through the middle, but I think we could’ve done a better job especially facing forward because sometimes we could receive them but facing backwards and we needed a lot of time just to turn and we couldn’t progress. We’re going to continue working on that because this is nothing new. We’ve been working on that because the way that we want to play is very important. So, when the ball goes there, you can have a better attack. I think today also we could have done maybe a better job with Trin, Ouleye (Sarr), Croix, with those players because when the ball arrived there, we were not as accurate as other games, maybe, with last pass or with the decision making. We wanted to progress and to finish fast with shooting or with maybe with just kicking the ball. It’s something that we’ve been working on, especially when we are in the half, we know that we need to be more patient, and if you cannot attack fast, we need to have longer possessions. Again, we need to learn from that and try to be better next week.”

On having to make decisions on the last two subs:

“Performance. I didn’t like what I was seeing, and we have enough players to move the team. I’m not criticizing them for sure. I’m talking about the energy, about the feeling that I have. We couldn’t find those players. I was feeling that today we were sometimes a little bit down. I don’t know why, to be honest. Sometimes you need to move the team. You need to provoke different things, different relationships. Bringing Hatchy and Britt (Brittany Ratcliffe), they have a great energy, and we’ve seen that at other games. We wanted to create different options. Ouleye, Croix, Trin, a lot of players, they’ve been playing a lot of games and sometimes when we see that the performance is maybe going down or the energy is not 100%, we need to move the team. I think it’s good to have that competition, and all the players can play, all the players can start, and they need to be 100% for sure.”

On Tara McKeown’s plays throughout the end of the game:

“Well, I think during the last minutes there are a lot of emotions and a lot of players, they want to go forward. She can do that, but I think today it wasn’t easy to dribble because the field, to be honest, is not so good for that especially in the middle. We wanted to progress more through the width, and those last minutes we’ve been working on that to try to put balls inside the box, to provoke set pieces, but she has that energy and for sure she wants to help the team going forward. I think we need to manage a little bit better those minutes because sometimes we need to be a little bit more patient and try to identify when it is a good time to put that ball or when to dribble and try to find the better option.”

Hal Hershfelt & Tara McKeown

On the problem North Carolina posed:

Hal: “I honestly think our lack of chances – well, we had quite a bit of chances that came from our rhythm and our energy. I feel like we had a good five to 10 minutes where we would be up in their half working it, but then we would kind of die off. I feel like that’s really where we went wrong this game. Yes, they are a good team, and I feel like they were able to expose us, especially through the middle a little bit, playing those slip balls into our box and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, I think it was up to us to really turn it up, and we didn’t do that.”

On defending Ashley Sanchez:

Tara: “It’s definitely a little weird seeing her on the other team. I think we had a game plan, and we just didn’t execute it as well as we probably hoped. Like Hal said, they were able to find slip passes in the pockets and behind our backs. Going forward we need to work on that this week.”

Hal: “She is a great player and she’s very good at finding those spaces in the midfield. She is a great player.”

On going to the Olympic Games:

Hal: “I’m really excited. Obviously, when you’re growing up playing soccer, that’s a big dream for everybody. I am so grateful that I have been given this opportunity, and I am so excited to go to Paris.”

On Jonatan Giráldez transitioning into the head coach role:

Tara: “I think we knew this moment was coming. We’re obviously still going to have Adrián on the sideline and as an assistant coach, and we are really looking forward to working with both of them going forward.”

On the biggest improvement that needs to be made before the next game:

Hal: “Just repeating what I touched on already, just the consistency of our rhythm and our intensity. I feel like that is something we really need to improve on. I hope we can take that into Bay.”

Tara: “I agree. I feel like our energy was just a little down today, and, like Aubrey (Kingsbury) said, we haven’t been shut out since the season opener. Just getting back at it this week and scoring more goals this upcoming weekend.”

On the North Carolina goal:

Tara: “Aubrey is a great player. Everyone has a mistake once or twice in their career, and that just happened to be her one. We are all behind her. We should have scored three goals to make up for it, so it is not on Aubrey, it’s on the defenders not giving enough pressure so she couldn’t shoot the ball, its everyone around, it is a team effort.”

On missing Andi Sullivan:

Hal: “First of all, Andi (Sullivan) brings so much leadership to our team. I think that was also something we were missing on the field. Obviously, we have leadership everywhere, like Trin (Rodman), Aubrey (Kingsbury), people like that, Tara (McKeown). Andi is really our central leader, and I feel like we did miss that quite a bit today, especially when it came to keeping the rhythm and intensity because I feel like we work really well off each other. Paige (Metayer) stepped up great, though I thought. She kind of came in, but North Carolina was just so good at taking advantage of those opportunities.”

On if McKeown’s drives were forcing an attempt or trying to pin North Carolina deeper:

Tara: “Probably a little of both. We were losing, obviously, so I think we just needed to get the ball up the field, and there was space in front of me to dribble, so I just took the space and looked for the passes up higher.”

On the condition of the pitch:

Tara: “It wasn’t great, but we both played on the same field, so it’s not really an excuse. It could be better.”

On the energy levels and leadership in critical moments:

Hal: “Honestly, I think that we could have been better at that throughout the game. Maybe being more upbeat during opportunities that we were crashing at their goal to make something happen. I also honestly thought that we could have used some calmness. It’s all about balance. I feel like there were sometimes where we could have taken control of the game in a different way, but we were too frantic. I think finding that good balance was very important for us, and we missed the mark on that tonight.”

The final days of North Carolina’s 2024 legislative session saw what had been a relatively unproductive affair end in a torrent of action, drama and confusion.

The legislature last week passed 33 bills — most of them on Thursday, the final day of votes.

At times, lawmakers appeared to have only a vague idea of what they were being asked to vote on as the House and Senate were quickly amending bills and shuffling them between one another for final approval.

At one point Thursday the Senate sent the House a new version of a bill containing a slew of public health policy changes. Democratic Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, asked if one of her Republican colleagues could explain what the new version would do — or if the House could take a three-minute break to let lawmakers read the bill they had just been asked to vote on.

House Speaker Tim Moore declined to allow a break. And the bill’s House lead, Rep. Larry Potts, R-Davidson, declined to answer Harrison’s question about what it would do.

The bill then passed, in a bipartisan 104-7 vote. It’s now on Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s desk to sign or veto. Senate Bill 425 appears to change the rules for county health directors, surrendering an unwanted newborn, trauma assessments of children in foster care, prison inmates and Medicaid benefits, security risk assessments for hospitals, and more.

Once that vote passed following Moore’s refusal to break for three minutes to let lawmakers read the bill, Moore then immediately announced the House would take a 15-minute break so lawmakers could look over and privately discuss a different bill.

Yet another bill removes hundreds of acres of land from Summerfield, a Greensboro suburb, at the request of a real estate developer who has been upset at the town council for not approving his proposed housing project. House Bill 909 passed Thursday without that proposal ever being vetted through any committee in the House of Representatives.

That’s a steep departure from legislative norms. Even several Republican lawmakers spoke out on the House floor to oppose the process, in a rare show of public defiance of GOP leadership.

“The Senate sends a bill over and everybody says, ‘This is just the way we do business,’” said Rep. Ben Ross, R-Richmond. “But folks … let’s do this the right way.”

“It has not been vetted, we have not had a chance to discuss it, nothing,” said Rep. Stephen Ross, R-Alamance, who predicted passing the bill would set a bad precedent for any local government anywhere in the state.

The bill passed, but with a substantial number of members from both parties opposed.

Other bills passed with less controversy, receiving unanimous or near-unanimous support in both chambers:

But as much as the session will be defined by any new laws that come out of it, it was also notable for what lawmakers failed to accomplish. Although Republicans hold a veto-proof supermajority in both chambers, they were unable to pass a new budget — the top priority of any legislative session.

Moore and his counterpart in the Senate, Sen. Phil Berger, each cast blame on the other for the failed budget negotiations. But they also expressed optimism for the Republican-led legislature’s ability to govern in the future, despite the numerous snags they hit this year.

“We continue to grow faster than just about any other state in the nation,” Berger told reporters Thursday. “In the next Census, in my opinion, we’re going to leapfrog Georgia and Ohio [and] become the seventh most populous state. I think anybody that objectively looks at that record would say that this state is well managed, and the policies adopted by this legislature … have been a net positive for the people in the state of North Carolina.”

Moore offered a similarly sunny view of the future: “The good news is, unlike a lot of states, we’re not sitting here looking at a giant hole that we have to fill,” he said when asked about the failure to pass a new budget. “We have a surplus. We have a surplus that is there because we have budgeted wisely. We have cut taxes. We have reduced regulations. And North Carolina is growing at a rate it has never seen before.”

The biggest loss for conservatives this year was the failure of a plan to add nearly half a billion dollars more to the state’s private school tuition voucher program.

Berger and Moore each agreed on that plan, but Moore said he would only pass it with additional raises for public school teachers. His plan proposed spending about four times as much on vouchers as on teacher raises. But Berger was strictly opposed to any further raises. So that deal — and with it, the entire budget process — fell apart.

High-profile bills missed the cut

In addition to failing to pass a budget adjustment to address the state’s $1 billion budget surplus for the fiscal year that begins Monday, the legislature also failed to pass four of the five constitutional amendments GOP leaders suggested putting on the ballot this November.

After some House Republicans failed to show up for the final days of voting, and GOP leaders were unable to win over any support from Democrats for most of their ideas, the only amendment that ended up passing was the citizen-only voting proposal.

Other notable bills also failed to make it across the finish line:

Both chambers also tried advancing last-minute changes to the state’s election laws ahead of this year’s key political races. But the House and Senate identified different priorities, and neither finished its work quickly enough for the other chamber to give potential approval.

But some of the ideas might still be alive. Sen. Warren Daniel, R-Burke, is a top election law official in the Senate. He told WRAL last week that he expected his bill to be looked over by House GOP election law officials this summer, when they would add in their own ideas and send it back to the Senate for a final vote.

His Senate Bill 88 would force more transparency on some — but not all — political ads created using artificial intelligence to make fake images, audio or other aspects of the ad, an idea some House Republicans also back. It would also institute a signature-matching program for mail-in ballots starting in 2025. And critics say a third proposal could give the Republican-led legislature wide leeway to gerrymander the districts used to elect local government leaders on city and county commissions.

Meanwhile, the House on Thursday passed its own set of election law changes but couldn’t get final approval from the Senate. House Bill 1071 would give outside “election integrity” groups the power to purge people from the voter rolls in North Carolina. That earned sharp criticism from Democrats. They said it will spread conspiracy theories about voter fraud and could even lead to bad-faith actors wrongfully stripping away thousands of people’s voter registrations.

“This bill sends a message that we don’t have any faith in our voting system,” said Rep. Allison Dahle, D-Wake. “Our voting system has been a good voting system — until one team lost and got upset. I’m concerned about that. I’m concerned about somebody by the name of ‘Totes Legit’ looking at voter rolls and deciding who can be on them. The other person I know of is Carol Snow.”

Election officials in Georgia conducted a lengthy investigation last year into voter irregularities alleged by an anonymous person calling themselves “Totes Legit Votes,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Georgia’s Republican-led elections office ultimately dismissed those claims. In North Carolina, WRAL reported earlier this year, elections officials conducted a similar investigation into claims made by Snow, who lives in Surry County.

Snow had claimed to have discovered evidence of many North Carolinians voting twice. But elections officials determined she simply made a number of mistakes in her research, such as confusing fathers and sons with the same name as being the same person. The North Carolina Board of Elections, made up of three Democrats and two Republicans, voted unanimously to dismiss her complaints.

Harrison, the Greensboro-area Democrat who had opposed the public health bill, also spoke against the election integrity bill. If Republican lawmakers actually cared about election security and integrity, she said, they would stop under-funding the State Board of Elections — which she said needs at least $4.6 million more just to be at its minimum requested funding levels heading into this year’s elections.

But for Republican leaders, there’s still some hope that the various election law changes and other bills they failed to get across the finish line could be brought back later this summer.

The legislature plans to now come back occasionally, mainly so that lawmakers can attempt overriding any vetoes Cooper issues in the next few days over any of the three dozen bills that just hit his desk.

They could also use those brief returns to pass some of the laws that didn’t quite make it over the finish line this month — and possibly even take a second crack at new constitutional amendments, as long as they don’t wait too long. Voting begins in September for this November’s general election.

Summer camps at Robeson Community College

From July 8 to July 12, Robeson Community College, in partnership with the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, will be offering Project IndigeCHOICE Camp for American Indian students across Robeson, Scotland, Cumberland, and Hoke counties.

Project IndigeCHOICE will have a wide range of activities for campers to participate in, such as Video Gaming, Wildlife Conservation, STEM projects, and so on. Additionally, this is a free camp funded through a grant from the Department of Education. If you or your child are interested, call 910-272-3700.

Happenings in the General Assembly

The Senate is currently working on passing legislation that would tightly regulate nicotine and hemp-derived products, making them safer for all users, but especially our children. To learn more, or to read the bills, go to: https://www.ncleg.gov/BillLookup/2023/H563; or https://www.ncleg.gov/BillLookUp/2023/H900

Veto Override

This week, Republicans in the Senate overrode three of Gov. Roy Cooper’s vetoes. The General Assembly has officially, and successfully, overridden all 22 of Gov. Cooper’s vetoes this biennium.

On the override of House Bill 237, Sen. Britt said, “There are thugs on the streets who wear masks so they can get away with harassing, and sometimes attacking, the public and police. The governor sought to continue encouraging this behavior with his veto of House Bill 237, but the legislature was never going to let that happen.”

Another important bill that modifies Juvenile Justice procedures, which also received a veto from Gov. Cooper, was recently overridden as well. The primary goal of this bill is to have individuals between the ages of 13 and 15 who have committed a Class A felony, and individuals who are 16 or 17 and committed a Class F or G felony, automatically transferred to superior court upon finding probable cause of such crime occurring. For more information about this bill, go to: https://www.ncleg.gov/BillLookUp/2023/h%20834v

Additionally, the Senate recently passed a bill that will make changes to certain Constitutional amendments. Notably, the bill aims to require valid photo identification for ALL people voting, not just those going in-person, cap the personal and corporate income tax rate at 5% rather than the current 7%, and to ensure that only those who are citizens and satisfy all other qualifications are able to vote in elections. This bill will now go back to the House for a final vote. To read more about this bill, go to: https://www.ncleg.gov/BillLookup/2023/S630 .

Senate Bill 630: Various Constitutional Amendments

As always, we appreciate your continued support and look forward to what’s to come! Please don’t hesitate to contact our office if you have any questions or concerns.

Sen. Danny Earl Britt Jr., Dist. 24 (Hoke, Robeson, Scotland), 300 N. Salisbury St., Room. 525, Raleigh, NC 27603, 919-733-5651.