St. Charles Falls to Defending State Champs Visitation Academy

The St. Charles soccer girls played a Class 2 sectional game at home against defending state champion Visitation Academy, and came up short 3-0.

The Tuesday game had a state quarterfinal game on the line, and the Pirates held them 0-0 through the first half and 10 minutes into the second. Pirates goal keeper Taylor Wolf was the main reason they stayed in the game for as long as they did. She finished the night with 27 saved shots on–16 in the first half.

"First half I wanted a lot of breaks," Wolf said, though she rarely got any. "Just a couple to let me breathe, but the defense helped a lot too. It wasn't just me in this game. They kind of held back the second half, but they had a lot of hard shots."

She stopped shots by diving, taking hard shots in the stomach, and by aggressively scrapping down on the ground.

"My dad always said, 'Try for any ball, if you think you can't reach it, you can reach it.' So, I dive for anything, and most of the time I reach it," Wolf said.

"The keeper was phenomenal," Visitation coach Dick Westbrook said. "She kept them in the game, and the longer the game went on, the more we pressed, and the more confidence they got."

When Visitation did get some shots past Wolf, in the second half, they were good ones. "There was no flukes on the goals. They were in the upper 90," Visitation coach Dick Westbrook said.

The Pirates were able to generate some opportunities in the second half, but nothing materialized. "We've been a second half team all year," Orrick said. "We knew with our fitness level, that...if they were pressing and plyaing a high back line, then we could counter with some offense, so we had to try it."

"I thought, up to to the first goal, as a defensive group, we did a pretty good job of making them shoot pretty far out, and that's all you can ask, we gave ourselves an opportunity tonight."

Visitation's first two goals were scored by senior midfielder, Ellie Bumb, and the third by Lydia Harlan, another senior midfielder. "These have been our go-to girls ever since they've been freshmen," Westbrook said.

St. Charles coach, Rodney Orrick said he thought junior Emily White was outstanding. "Autumn Olendorff (sophomore) did a good job, for the time she was there, one of the back four, also Jordan Trautmann (senior) stepped it up the second half, as did Emily Wilson (senior). There was a lot of defensive work being done in the midfield too."

"It's one of those situations where they moved the ball quite well and we had to just absorb that pressure," Orrick said, "and hope to get a counter out of it. Sometimes that's the way the game gets played."

Orrick said they were obviously disapointed. "You get this far you want to keep going, you don't want that ride to stop, but I will tell you...we've made huge strides here at the end, we played against the defending state champions, argualbly the best team in the state, and we played nil-nil until about 20 minutes left."

Visitation will play St. Dominic on Saturday in a state quarterfinal game.