Morgan Rose spoke up. Goalies Morgan Coleman and Emily Garcia stepped up.
In turn, Albemarle field hockey walked away with a 2-1 (3-2) win in extra time over St. Anne’s-Belfield that may have just flipped the switch for the Patriots.
“It’s a huge turnaround from last week, it kind of resets our season for us,” said Albemarle coach Brittany McElheny.
With the game headed to overtime, McElheny had to explain how overtime worked to her young keepers. Shortly after a scoreless 7v7 portion of overtime, she then named the first four players who would participate in the 1v1 segment from the 25-yard line and asked the rest of the team who wanted to join them. That’s when Rose spoke up.
“She said ‘who’s going to step up’ and I just blurted out ‘me’,” Rose said. “I’m a newer player and I was really nervous honestly. I just wanted it not only for myself but my team. We’ve worked really hard and we lost 11 seniors last year, we just really needed a game that will make us realize ‘oh we can do this, we can step up, we can put the ball in the back of the cage, we can win.”
After a strong performance by Coleman and Santinga early in the shootout and a couple of goals by Nyla Lewis and Kat Bianchetto, the Patriots led 2-2 going into Rose’s fifth and final opportunity against Santinga, STAB’s new keeper who won a state title with Covenant in 2016.
“We know that she’s really fast and aggressive and we were trying to work our moves as opposed to our power,” Rose said.
Rose connected and put the Patriots up 3-2 leaving Garcia to close. Both Coleman and McLaughlin had made a couple of early stops, but Garcia was up to the final challenge for the Patriots, making two saves before a third shot slipped past. It came just a split second after the eight second time limit and was waived off, sealing the win. Being throw into 25s in the second game of the season was a tall challenge for the Patriots’ keepers.
“At the end of practice we work on it so that’s really helped being a new goalie but I just have to focus on the ball and that I’m ready for it,” Coleman said. “Knowing that my team is cheering me on no matter what helps a lot.”
After a long stretch of scoreless field hockey, Albemarle took a 1-0 lead with a Myers goal with just 14:41 to play, but STAB refused to go away. The Saints countered with Claire McKinney breaking through for the equalizer a little less than five minutes later. That eventually sent the game to overtime and a 7v7 battle, followed by 25s, field hockey’s unique approach to the shootout, where the field player starts way back and has to dribble and attack, like an ice hockey shootout rather than a soccer shootout. That led, as it usually does, to some physical, exciting play between players and goalies. It’s also a vital experience for both teams as they’re more likely to encounter the overtime scenario as games get tighter during the playoffs.
“We battled hard so we were obviously pretty upset but I told them, ‘hold on to how upset you are and let that motivate you but at the same time, know that we’re going to learn from this’,” said STAB coach Kim Kastuk.
Albemarle already knows exactly how valuable getting into one of these double overtime, 25s shootout situations is after last season. They were the only team in their region who’d been in a game like that.
“The fact that we can pull that off early gives us a little bit of confidence and now we know what we can keep working on,” McElheny said.
