FARMINGTON HILLS – Clarkston rolled into Thursday’s regional finals with a hat trick by Fagan Roy that powered the Wolves’ convincing 4-1 win over the Hartland Eagles Tuesday evening.
“It was a very good performance from everybody, I thought,” Wolves head coach Ian Jones said. “Obviously, Hartland had a great season. They’re a good team. They had a pretty identical record to us. They had a very respectable schedule.”
The teams came into the matchup having been ranked in the top-8 of Division 1 at the end of the regular season, but No. 5 Clarkston wasted no time showing it was the better team on the night. The Wolves were all over the Eagles early, scoring a pair of goals in the first 15 minutes as Clarkston seemed to get to every loose ball.
Roy got his first goal of the evening with 30:01 on the clock when Clarkston blasted a series of shots from in close, getting to multiple rebounds before Roy finally elevated a ball enough to find the net with the goalie prone. Four minutes later, Clarkston struck again when Hartland goalie Trip Tomyn made a fine save to flick a ball away, but the rebound quickly found its way to Cole Cooper, who blasted a shot back in, through traffic and into the net, doubling Clarkston’s lead.
“They (Clarkston) started really well,” Eagles head coach Andrew Kartsounes said. “I think that we were a step off at the beginning. I think we picked it up there in the second half for 20 minutes and showed a little bit more of what we could do. But overall, it was their night.”
The Eagles would eventually find their footing and start to generate some offense, particularly in the second half. But Clarkston ended up weathering the storm both figuratively and literally as a heavy downpour opened up for the first 20 minutes of the second half. Despite the wind and the rain pushing the ball around and making it difficult to play the ball out of its own end, Clarkston kept Hartland off the board, then put the game out of reach when Roy scored two more goals just 18 seconds apart – one on a quick attack from Clarkston, and yet another rebound that he side-footed in from near the penalty spot.
Clarkston’s Jameson Duty moves the ball across the pitch as rain falls in the Wolves 4-1 victory over Hartland Tuesday night. (TIMOTHY ARRICK – For MediaNews Group)
The Eagles put up a fight right to the end and got a late goal when Avery Bryan was fouled in the penalty area, then stepped up to slot home the ensuing penalty kick. But it was too little, too late for Hartland, who never quite felt back in the game once Clarkston got the early two-goal lead.
“We have the ability to score goals very, very quickly. We can go into moments where in 10 minutes we can score two, three, four goals like – bang. We’ve done it all season, so if we’re playing really well or even when we’re not, we can still do that. But today we were creating chance upon chance and obviously a couple went in quickly, and in the second half, the same thing, a couple went in quickly,” Jones said.
Photos of Clarkston vs. Hartland in a D1 boys soccer regional semifinal
Things don’t get any easier for the Wolves (19-2-1). Clarkston advances to the regional finals on Thursday where it will face Detroit Catholic Central, ranked 11th in the final D1 poll. This will be the Wolves’ fifth trip to regionals in the last eight years, but they have not gotten past the regional final in any of the previous four trips. Three of those times they were eliminated by the Shamrocks.
Hartland finishes 19-3-1.
“We have a great group of seniors, eight guys who have really turned this program around and led us and brought us forward in a way that we haven’t been on the boys side of things. Winning our division in the league and then winning our first district since 2016, that’s due to these seniors and the work that they’ve put in over the last few years,” Kartsounes said.