The Brownwood Lions halted a three-game District 5-4A soccer slide and completed a league sweep of Little River Academy in the process with a 3-0 home triumph Friday night at Gordon Wood Stadium.

After a one-year absence, the victory clinched a playoff berth for the fourth-place Lions (5-9-1, 2-4), who lead fifth-place Academy two games in the standings with two contests left, and Brownwood owns the tiebreaker due to the district sweep.

“I’m super satisfied with how we performed today,” said Lions head coach Michael Westerman. “We’ve been in a bind recently even though we’ve played well but the results haven’t fallen our way. We’ve tried to depict what the issues are and the biggest thing we wanted to address was playing with high intensity the entire 80 minutes. We came out to play tonight and got the result we wanted.”

The Lions grabbed the lead just 5:08 into the contest when Raven Prado scored the only goal needed.

“The first goal with Raven Prado, he’s very athletic and they played a high line and we were able to find the diagonal split,” Westerman said. “It was good for Raven to get behind them, play the 1v1 and put it past the keeper.”

The Lions scored again with 18:16 left before intermission, thanks to a goal from Jose Rodriguez that firmly seized the momentum.

“The distance shot from Jose Rodriguez, one of our seniors and an extremely talented midfielder, he’s a got a great leg and a great shot,” Westerman said. “ We’ve been trying to find ways to put him into space where he can shoot the balland tonight we did that and was rewarded for it.

The Lions finished the scoring with 25:28 left in the contest on a penalty kick by Isaac Morales.

“Isaac, another of our talented 1v1 attacking players, was able to drive into space, attack players and put the defense in an uncomfortable position,” Westerman said. “He drove into the box and forced them into a foul and we were able to secure the PK.”

The Lions will next wrap up the home portion of their schedule as they host Gatesville at 7 p.m. Tuesday.