Lions move on to sectional final vs. Lake Forest
By Gary Larsen

 

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The rematch has been set.

With sectional semifinal wins on Tuesday, top-seeded Saint Viator (13-8-4) and No. 2 Lake Forest (16-4-2) set the table for a Class 2A sectional title game on Friday that figures to be a doozy.

“That will be a heck of a game,” Saint Viator coach Mike Taylor said. “They’re good. That will be a dogfight.”

Eight weeks ago, Saint Viator beat Lake Forest 1-0 on a Katelyn Hammarlund goal. After Viator dominated play against Deerfield and Lake Forest did the same against Lakes on Tuesday, Taylor anticipates a much less one-sided contest for either team in Friday’s rematch.

“The field will be a little bit more spread because you won’t have everything compacted in one area,” Taylor said. “It will be two teams going at each other, with different and probably better opportunities just because there’s more space on the field than you saw today.”

Saint Viator outshot No. 4 Deerfield 33-2 Tuesday but couldn’t find a goal until the game’s 75th minute, when Hammarlund stepped onto a ball at the goalmouth and chested in the only goal of the game. The play started with a Katherine Petrovich corner kick that hit off Katie Gavin before Chloe Luthringhausen knocked it off the crossbar from close-range.

The ball fell to the ground, bounced, and Hammarlund buried it.

“It hit the bar and went straight up,” Hammarlund said. “It looked like it might be going in, so I just made sure.”

Hammarlund and Luthringhausen were a persistent presence around the Warriors’ goal all day, for a Lions team with a high work rate that found feet all day and played good, clean, physical soccer from the outset.

The only thing missing for most of the day was a goal.

“It’s nice to dominate like that but if you don’t put one away you end up giving (Deerfield) the belief that they just need one goal to win the game,” Taylor said. “The hardest thing in the game to do is finish, but when you get that many opportunities like that, you have to finish. “

Hammarlund agreed.

“It’s fun when you have all those opportunities but we have to work on placing it to the corners and it’s our finishing touches that we have to work on,” Hammarlund said. “I had a few that I should have slid it to the side but it hit off my foot and went up.

“But I liked how everyone was running up together. There was always someone there for the majority of the time and we were pressuring together.”

The Lions hit a post and a crossbar in the game’s opening minutes, setting the tone for a day of persistent attacking pressure. Deerfield was dangerous on counter runs and the Warriors earned a good handful of corner kicks in the second half in flirting with a goal of their own.

Saint Viator keeper Morgan Hess came up with the save of the game at 68 minutes, sliding out to stop a shot at the post, set up by a corner. It was the Warriors’ one truly dangerous shot on frame of the day.

The Lions fought through any frustration that may have been mounting over lost opportunities, and kept their shoulder to the wheel until Hammarlund’s game-deciding goal, her 10th of the season.

“I thought Katelyn played well and I thought Chloe played one her best games of the season,” Taylor said. “And I thought  KG (Katie Gavin) played well in the middle, our outside midfielders played well, and Petrovich played well again.”

For Lake Forest, host and No. 5 Lakes provided a different kind of frustration in the day’s second semifinal game.  The Scouts ultimately prevailed 5-2 but spent the vast majority of the first half on Lakes’ half of midfield, essentially searching for a shot in a crowded penalty area.

“Their defense was so congested in there, and there was no room for us to move,” Scouts’ senior Catherine Traut said. “We couldn’t get anything in there.”

To make matters worse, Lakes scored on its lone shot of the first half and led 1-0 at the break. But Lake Forest coach Ty Stuckslager wasn’t pressing any panic buttons, considering the extent to which his girls had dominated play through 40 minutes.

“I thought we’d be fine. We just had to work on some things,” Stuckslager said. “One was attacking the goal, and our crosses in the first half – three of them were near-post and one of them was twenty yards wide. It was about timing our runs and I think three or four of our goals came from putting it close to the penalty spot and then just attacking the goal.”

Five minutes into the second half, the door finally kicked open for the Scouts when Kali Polich scored the first of four Lake Forest goals scored in the first 20 minutes after the intermission. Traut scored goals at 48 and 55 minutes to make it 3-1, Abby Shipp tucked a left-footed shot inside the near post at 57 minutes, and Kelly Murphy finished the day’s scoring for the Scouts at 73 minutes.

“It was a whole new half and a whole new game in the second half,” said Traut, who now has 19 goals on the season. “We wanted to come out completely different in the second half, and spread them out better.”

Lakes added a penalty kick goal by Mikaela Brown in the loss.

“Lakes got behind the ball and defended well and frustrated us,” Stuckslager said. “Our girls weren’t playing to our game-plan and we talked at halftime about how there were still forty minutes. But hats off to Lakes. They did a great job and I think they were just outmatched in the end.”

The Scouts square off against Saint Viator at 6 p.m. on Friday, with a supersectional berth on the line.

“We played them on turf so it will be a different game on grass, and they were a strong team,” Traut said. “It was a very back-and-forth game and they had a good combination and scored off it.”

Stuckslager anticipates a battle on Friday.

“We play the same game against everyone and we just want to play better each game,” Stuckslager said. “We’ll organize a game plan against Viator and they’ll do the same, and ultimately it will come down to who executes and who can withstand the pressure of a sectional final.”