After 100 minutes of entertaining-but-scoreless soccer in Tuesday’s Class 2A boys soccer semifinal at U.S. Bank Stadium, the shootout between St. Paul Central and East Ridge to determine the final spot in Thursday’s state final was tied 3-3 through three rounds.
Then East Ridge’s Zack Kraus missed a shot that banged off the cross bar, and Raptors goalkeeper Nick Wagner thought, “Oh, no.”
“I knew I had to do something big to get us back in it,” Wagner said.
His teammates knew he would. As Kraus walked back to his teammates after his miss, senior defender Reese Dodd went over to him to deliver a message.
“(I said), ‘We’ve had Nick’s back all year. We protected him; now he’s going to protect us,’ ” Dodd said. “I knew he was going to save it.”
Sure enough, Wagner stopped the next shot. The match was still tied.
“Then,” senior midfielder Miles Sitcawich said, “we were all like, ‘Alright, we got this.’ ”
His confidence lasted for at least one more round. Both Central and East Ridge kickers scored on their ensuing kicks, meaning after both teams had gone through their original five-man lineups for sudden-death penalty kicks, it was time to go to the second groups of five.
Sitcawich was in that group, but not the preferred option — not for most of the season, anyway. He went on a trip to Ireland over the summer with his club team and never made any penalty kicks. Finally, he realized he had to stop kicking with the inside of his foot and just get his laces on the ball.
Once he figured that out, he tried to get the Raptors coaches to move him into the top five. They weren’t having it. He was about eighth on the Raptors’ list of penalty kickers. But he told his teammates that, if the teams were tied after five rounds, they could just let him know if they wanted him to take the next shot.
And, when the time came, senior midfielder Cullen Featherstone turned to Sitcawich and asked, “Miles, do you want to take it?”
Oh, he wanted to take it. So he eagerly started to make the long jog toward the goal, and that’s when the moment hit him.
“I was feeling nervous,” he said. “But then I looked down at the ball and I just hammered it.”
And found the back of the net. So everything was back on Wagner’s shoulders. And as Central’s Dylan Barrett stepped up, Wagner had a gut feeling he was going left.
“I just had to trust my gut and went there,” he said.
He was right. He stopped the shot, sending the third-seeded Raptors (17-2-1) to the state final, where they’ll meet top-seeded Edina, which beat Minneapolis Washburn 2-0 earlier in the day.
“We were fortunate to come out on the winning end tonight,” East Ridge coach Anthony Bidwell said. “I’m glad I have a really confident set of players that know how to play the game very well, and they carried that confidence right through the chute out, and I didn’t think they’d go about it any other way.”
Thursday’s match featured East Ridge’s defensive prowess against Central’s high-octane offense. It was quality soccer for 100 minutes, though neither team developed much in the way of dangerous scoring chances.
“We tried our best, it was a great game, and there has to be a winner. We cannot keep playing all day,” Central coach David Albornoz said. “So we go to the shootouts, and once you get there, it’s just a coin toss.”
And the Minutemen (19-2) came out on the wrong side of it. It’s the second time in as many years Central suffered a crushing defeat on this stage, after losing to Stillwater in a tight contest last fall.
“If we wouldn’t have gotten here (this year), it would’ve been disappointing,” Central senior midfielder Max Hand said. “Obviously, our goal was to go all the way, but it means a lot that people came, and we just wish we could’ve scored a goal. … Unfortunately, it didn’t go that way.”
Still, Albornoz couldn’t have been prouder of his senior group, the first batch of kids to be with him for the entirety of their high school careers. Central, which is loaded with young talent, expects to contend again next fall. It has the look of a perennial power that seems destined to eventually reach the top of the mountain.
“We’ll keep trying, that’s for sure,” Albornoz said. “I don’t think we’d have been able to (build this) without these (seniors)… I’m extremely happy and proud of what they achieved.”
2019-10-29 23:26:00Z
https://www.twincities.com/2019/10/29/class-2a-boys-soccer-east-ridge-in-state-final-after-shootout-win-over-central/
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