First Time CCS Soccer Championship!!!
Article S. M Daily Journal by Nathan Mollat
SAN JOSE – No one is ever completely satisfied with a tie, but given the circumstances, the Aragon girls’ soccer team was downright giddy to tie Presentation 2-2 in the Central Coast Section Division II championship game at Valley Christian High Saturday morning.
Due to a quirk in the CCS rules, if a soccer championship game is tied after 80 minutes of regulation and 20 minutes of overtime, the two teams share the title. There is no penalty-kick tiebreaker.
None of that matters to the Dons, the No. 4 seed, who earned their first-ever CCS soccer title.
“That was fun,” said Aragon coach Will Colglazier. “(The tie doesn’t) doesn’t diminish (the title) at all. We get to hang a (CCS championship) banner.”
It’s Aragon’s first CCS title in any sport since the football team won the 1994 Division III championship.
The Dons (14-3-6) ran the gauntlet of emotions throughout the game. They took a 1-0 just before halftime on Kat McAuliffe’s 17th goal of the season. She took a short pass from Stephanie Woo and blasted her shot into the roof of the goal in the 40th minute.
Aragon was 12 minutes from an outright championship when an Aragon defender was whistled for a handball in the penalty box for a St. Francis penalty kick. Aragon goalkeeper Ashley Lentz made the save of Taylor Johnson’s initial shot, but the rebound went right back to Johnson, who put the ball away to tie the score at 1.
Presentation (17-4-3) took its first lead of the game when Maggie Von Massenhausen scored off a header in the 90th minute – the end of the first overtime.
With 10 minutes left to play, Colglazier gave his team a pep talk between overtime periods.
“I told the team during that two-minute water break, I just made up a number, ‘Look, we’ve scored 55 goals this year. We can score one more!”
Which is exactly what the Dons did. Earning a corner kick in the 93rd minute, Woo sent a short pass to Rachel Bradley-Haas, who, from the left side of the Presentation penalty box, put a shot on goal.
Teammate Caity Winterbottom was standing at the near post, with a defender on her back. As the ball approached Winterbottom, she spread her legs to let the ball go through – a “dummy” in soccer parlance. Not only did the ball slide between her legs, it went through the defender’s legs as well and past the screened goalkeeper to tie the score at 2.
“I had no clue (the ball would go in),” Bradley-Haas said. “I was really nervous.
“It’s really surreal right at this point.”
Making it more surreal was the fact Bradley-Haas played defense for a majority of the game because of the losses to the backline because of injury. It was only after Presentation took the lead that Bradley-Haas pushed up into the attack.
The fact the Dons did it with four starters out made the feat even more impressive. With a veritable MASH unit on the sidelines, 10 of the 11 Aragon players played all 100 minutes of the game. The only starter not to was sophomore forward Kimi Petsche, who picked up a yellow card in the 61st minute. Per high school rules, she had to come out of the game until the next Aragon deadball. Freshman forward Addy Eveslage came on and the Dons did not skip a beat. In her few minutes in the game, she gave it her all.
“The bench stepped up super huge,” Colglazier said.
Freshman Jenny Winterbottom, who started and played the whole game, played like a seasoned veteran, showing no nerves at all in the biggest game of her short high school career.
The fourth-seeded Dons, who knocked off top-seeded and previously undefeated Los Gatos in the semifinals, were not intimidated by the second-seeded Presentation, which is the West Catholic Athletic League regular-season champion. After weathering the Panthers’ initial onslaught at the beginning of each half, the Dons slowly gained possession and controlled the flow of the game.
“From the very beginning, we were here to win this game,” Bradley-Haas said. “We knew this where we were supposed to be.”
Colglazier said he noticed Presentation did a lot of its damage in the Panthers’ 3-2 win over Burlingame in the semifinals. All three Presentation goals came off headers. Colglazier told his team the game would be won in the air Saturday.
“Our goal was to win in the air and I think we did,” Colglazier said. “We had more chances, more good opportunities, than them.”
The co-championship is the culmination of an up-and-down career for the class of 2010, who were freshmen when the Dons advanced to the semifinals of CCS for the first time in school history. Last season, however, the Dons didn’t even qualify for the postseason.
“Aragon had never made it past the semifinals,” Bradley-Haas said. “We knew we had a special team at the beginning of the season.”
Soccer – Girls Var 3/6 Update Dons 2010 CCS DII Co-Champs! Watch for Story!!! Aragon defeats Saint Ignatius 1-0, move onto CCS Semifinals
Midfielder Stevie Herrera scored on a header in the 57th minute, and the Dons’ youthful defense and freshman goalie Ashley Lentz looked sharp in a CCS Division II quarterfinal against No. 5 seed St. Ignatius at Milpitas.
Fourthseeded Aragon, which has never played in a CCS championship game, advances to meet No. 1 seed Los Gatos in Thursday’s 7 p. m. semifinal at Valley Christian.
After Kat McAuliffe sent a cross in from the left corner, several Dons grappled for the ball with SI goalie Laura Garcia, who could only deflect it.
Herrera converted her open header just inside the far post.
