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McDERMOTT — Sometimes, all you need is one.
One bounce to go your way, one perfectly placed pass through traffic, one save with a lead … or, if you’re North Adams, one beautifully struck ball on a reset from senior Kenlie Jones.
That’s what it took for the Green Devils (11-6-1) to top Wheelersburg on Monday in a Division III district semifinal at Northwest High School.
CREDIT: Derrick Webb/SOSA
“I’ve been preaching and I’ve been pretty hard on them all season,” North Adams coach Morgan Hendrickson said. “Losing Laney [Ruckel] last year was a big, big loss. Offensively, we’ve just struggled. We’ve struggled to find the back of the net, we’ve struggled to put goals away. And so the teams that we’re losing to, we’re losing by just a couple of goals, and just not capitalizing on things. So I’d been preaching and preaching that this game was going to be won and lost by restarts. It was going to be won and lost by, and, it could just come down to one goal. And it did today.”
The eventual game-winner came with 26:50 left in the second half. The score was after a foul call nearly 30 yards away from the goal.
But Jones didn’t care.
She placed the ball just outside the keeper’s reach and nestled it into the upper-right hand of the netting to give North Adams a 1-0 lead. And, in the scoring department, that’s all she wrote.
“Kenlie came in and she was cool, calm and collected,” Hendrickson said. “She takes a lot of my free kicks. A lot of times, she gets in her head and thinks that she’s going to over-kick it. But tonight, she literally put on a show. I could not have pictured anything better.”
That was in the midst of a defensively-centered match.
Wheelersburg (13-5-1) came into the contest averaging just over four goals per night and they’d given up 25 scores — or 1.32 per game.
The Pirates brought their stifling defense and it showed throughout much of the evening. However, it was North Adams’ unit — led by defender Tatum Grooms and keeper Harlee Brand — that stole the spotlight.
“[The defense] has held it down. We’re kind of using five defensive players,” Hendrickson said. “And they did their jobs. They did an excellent job of pushing the ball up. They’re fast. They’re skilled and they’re fast. You need to hold it down in the back and they did. Harlee did a good job of holding down the net and they did their job as a collective five in the back.”
That group, alongside the rest of their teammates, remembered what happened way back on Sept. 16 when Wheelersburg handed them a 3-1 loss.
The taste of that loss still resonating allowed the Green Devils to stay focused, stay physical and grit out a hard-nosed win.
“I told them, I was like, ‘You’re going to have to have a lot of energy when you come out. In the locker room, I mean, I walked in there and I thought I was in a, you know, a club or something,” Hendrickson said. “It was fun. When they came out of the locker room, they were ready to go. They’ve been waiting for this game for a long time.”
While Wheelersburg’s season comes to an end, North Adams advances to a Division III district championship game at 6 p.m., Thursday at Valley High School. There, the Devils will meet a familiar opponent in conference rival Lynchburg-Clay.
In the two’s earlier meeting this season, the Mustangs took home a 1-0 win of their own.
“We only lost by a goal to [LC] in the season,” Hendrickson said. “And I will say I don’t feel like we played our best. We weren’t playing our best soccer then. It was one of those things where we had a really, really tough week, probably our toughest week. We played Minford and the next day, we played Fairfield, who was voted a number two seed. So it was a hard week coming into Lynchburg. So I think that we’re better prepared now. This was a good warm-up game and a hard-fought win. Now we’re ready. We’re ready to tackle a regional semifinal rematch.”
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