For the first time in three years there’s a changing of the guard in senior girls soccer.
The Holy Trinity Academy Knights bucked a two-year trend of silver medal finishes behind the Canmore Crusaders with a 3-0 shutout to take the Foothills Athletic Council championship on a brisk Monday afternoon at Riverside Park in Okotoks.
“They’ve been strong competition for three years and we’ve always lost to them in the finals,” said Knights Grade 12 defender Taylor Mullaly. “This year we wanted to make our biggest impact and beat them.
“We’re happy with the results.”
Neither team could get much of a foothold to start the gold-medal tilt.
It took a mistake to break the deadlock midway through the first half.
Steady midfielder Kayla Pagnotta pounced on a deep kick, evaded the on-charging Crusaders goaltender and calmly put the ball in the back of the empty net to give the Knights the crucial opening marker.
“It’s important, that first goal,” Pagnotta said. “She came out and I just made a touch and got it around her.”
HTA doubled its lead early in what was a dominant second-half.
Striker Shealie Lock threaded a perfect through ball for Alysia King down the right wing and the powerful midfielder made the most of the opportunity firing a shot past the keeper.
Amanda Rempel rounded out the scoring with a well-earned tally.
Seconds after missing a sitter in-front of goal, the industrious winger more than made up for it with a brilliant looping strike from distance over the fingertips of the Crusaders goalie.
At the other end of the pitch, the Crusaders could barely get a sniff at goal.
The steadying presence of centre-backs Abbie Wade, Lauren Sinclair and full-backs Shaylynn Whaley and Mullaly made for a relatively quiet affair for netminder Andrea LaFont.
“We’ve won in the season and came out in the final and lost,” King said. “We didn’t want to do that again.
“We for sure kept our focus and kept pushing.”
The focus for the Knights was to not come up empty-handed on the heels of a fourth-place finish as hosts of the South Central Zone championship, Oct. 14-15.
Rockyview’s three entries would prove too much as Cochrane took the gold, Springbank was second and Bow Valley was third. Canmore edged out the Foothills Falcons in the fifth-place match.
“We knew coming out of zones with the result we did, we wanted to finish off with this game instead of our zone game,” Mullaly added.
The Knights and Crusaders both played five games in a four-day span.
Though the teams may have been running on fumes with shorter benches, adrenaline has a way of trumping fatigue in championship games.
“I feel like we were all sore and tired,” Pagnotta said. “But it didn’t seem like it, we forgot about that while we were on the field.”
