The Brownwood Lions needed less than two minutes to score, then continued to fill up the net throughout the contest in a 7-0 triumph over Gatesville in District 5-4A soccer action Friday night at Gordon Wood Stadium.

The Lions (6-1-2, 3-0) extended their unbeaten streak to seven matches and also remained atop the league standings with the win.

Lions head coach Michael Westerman said the key to the recent hot streak is, “The mentality of the group and understanding what the expectations are. I tell the boys to be confident but don’t be content. We’ve had some good success this year and we’ve been winning games and scoring a lot, and it’s been nice and fun and we need to enjoy it. But ultimately our objective is to play against the best teams in the state and we want to see how we match up with those teams because that’s how we want to recognized – a team that competes with the best and ultimately is the best as the end goal. Our expectations within the team and the accountability they hold within each other is what creates the consistency of success.”

Aiden Jimenez scored the first goal 1:28 into the contest, then added two more goals with 24:04 and 22:24 remaining in the game to secure a hat trick against Gatesville (5-7, 0-3).

“I praise Aiden all the time and his work gets noticed by everybody because he works extremely hard,” Westerman said. “He’s only a sophomore, but the ability that he has to be successful in this sport is far more than I could ever express. He puts himself in great positions all the time, the ball just hasn’t gone his way, but tonight he was in his rhythm, so this was very well deserving.”

Plenty of other Lions lit up the scoreboard as well as Eli Valenciano scored at the 21:59 mark of the first half, then Jonathan Skrhak got into the scoring act with 4:51 left before intermission as the lead stood at 3-0 at the break.

Then in the second half, Isaac Morales scored on a penalty kick 9:09 after halftime, and Raven Prado rounded out the scoring with 10:01 remaining.

“That’s territory we’re trying to get more familiar with,” Westerman said. “I’ve said since the beginning of the season we have a lot of attacking weapons this year, which is nice because the most difficult thing to do is to break teams down and make opportunities in the attacking third and find the back of the net. That’s something we’ve struggled with in my years being here, but this season we’ve really been able to step up with a lot of different players getting on the score sheet, which speaks volumes to our attacking threat this year.”

The Lions next head to Stephenville (7-6-4, 3-0) at 7 p.m. Tuesday in a showdown between the 5-4A co-leaders.

“It’s a game we’ve been talking about all season,” Westerman said. “We know the competition Stephenville brings not only technically on the pitch but a Brownwood-Stephenville game in any sport is going to be intense. We’ve been preparing for this and taking care of business as we should have with these other teams, and the expectation doesn’t change when we go to Stephenville.”