LEHIGHTON \u2014 Abington Heights did what it did all season.<\/p>\n
The Lady Comets created scoring opportunities, and played stellar defense.<\/p>\n
They just couldn\u2019t cash in, while District 1 champion Radnor did.<\/p>\n
Arabella Steel kicked a perfect corner in front of the net, and Ryan Ertel finished it with a header. The first-half goal held up, as the Raptors defeated the District 2 champions, 1-0, on Saturday at Lehighton Area High School in the PIAA Class 3A girls soccer quarterfinals.<\/p>\n
Radnor (19-4) advances to Tuesday\u2019s semifinals where it will face District 3 runner-up Lower Dauphin, a winner over District 12\u2019s St. Hubert\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Abington Heights (19-3-1) finishes its season as the Lackawanna League Division I and District 2 Class 3A champions.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m so incredibly proud of this team and all of their hard work,\u201d Abington Heights coach Meghan Noone said. \u201cI started coaching at Abington with them, so they are definitely a very special group to me. It\u2019s the best team I\u2019ve ever been a part of chemistry-wise on and of the field. I just hope that they carry these memories and lessons with them throughout life.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the first few minutes, Abington Heights\u2019 Lilia Calvert had a run and blasted a shot on goal. Charlotte Whitcomb made the save, and it deflected in front of the net. However, Whitcomb made a great recovery to stop Hawley Lynott\u2019s putback and keep it scoreless.<\/p>\n
Two minutes later, Radnor forced a corner, and Steel lifted the perfect pass to Ertel for a 1-0 lead with 34:12 left in the first half.<\/p>\n
The Lady Comets were on their heels for most of the first half, but stood tall on defense to keep the deficit at one.<\/p>\n
In the second half, Abington Heights pushed the ball into Radnor territory. Calvert had a free kick that Allison Stanton just missed on a header finish. Lauren Bartell popped the ball up toward the net that Whitcomb, who finished with five saves, backpedaled and leaped to save.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Bri Bustos manned the back line, hitting a header on a Radnor corner to clear it, blocking Keira Mucksavage\u2019s shot and stealing the ball to stop a run in the second half.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe just doesn\u2019t get enough recognition every game because she steps up, she creates so many chances off of her head in the box,\u201d Calvert said. \u201cEvery 1 v. 1 she pretty much wins it. Today, no one scored on her. She slows them down, she gets in front of them and no one really gets by Bri.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brooklyn Yankow also stepped up, making a sliding stop on a Radnor run and also providing pressure on offense with a few runs.<\/p>\n
\u201cBrooklyn\u2019s obviously a freshman,\u201d Calvert said. \u201cNo one\u2019s heard of her until she started playing in some varsity games this year, and I know that from her point of view she\u2019s very timid and she\u2019s very scared to come into games like this, so playing a lot of a state quarterfinal game and coming out and working her (butt) off the whole game and making some really good plays down in our defensive end, she deserves so much credit for this game and even on the offensive end, she was all over the place today, and she was making huge plays for us and working really hard.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the ball made it through the defense, keeper Morgan Davis, who finished with six saves, was there to make some spectacular stops and keep the deficit at 1-0.<\/p>\n
\u201cMorgan\u2019s new to goalkeeping, too, so she has grown so much individually in that position and I look forward to continuing with that,\u201d Noone said. \u201cShe\u2019s made some huge saves this season. She\u2019s an incredible PK saver, which is so rare. I don\u2019t even know how you get good at that. She just has a quirk to her. She has come such a long way.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Lady Comets kept the pressure on and created some direct kick opportunities, but couldn\u2019t get the equalizer.<\/p>\n
Although Abington Heights\u2019 season ended sooner than it wanted, it avenged a loss to Crestwood in last year\u2019s district semifinals with a dominant run to the district crown this season.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m so proud,\u201d Calvert said. \u201cWe were looked down upon a lot by some other people in our league and even from around us, just because of how we finished last year and losing in the semifinals of districts. All the girls that we have right here are the same exact girls that could have been playing last year, and we came out and we all worked so hard this preseason, which is so different for us.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven throughout the whole year, we just worked so much harder than any team I\u2019ve ever been on and it paid off. I know that this game didn\u2019t go how we wanted it to, but we were in the game the whole time. If we didn\u2019t get that one goal on us in the beginning, I think this game would have been completely different. We should just take the positives instead of the negatives out of this whole season.\u201d<\/p>\n
Calvert, a Rutgers commit, ends her career as one of the best players in District 2 history, recording more than 400 career points and breaking her school record of 65 goals she set in her sophomore year with 68 this season.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know high school definitely didn\u2019t start how I wanted it to,\u201d Calvert said. \u201cI was benched for the first time in my life when I came to high school, so that was very hard \u2014 something that I worked really hard to overcome. Finishing my senior year breaking my own record that I thought I would never touch again my sophomore year, I thought that was a one-and-done thing and I came out and I broke it by a couple goals, which is really hard to do and I am self-aware of that and I\u2019m very proud of myself.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think becoming a leader on this team was also another huge goal of mine because when I was younger I didn\u2019t really understand what being a captain was. I knew that good players are usually captains, but I truly learned what it means to be a leader and how your support and not just how you play on the field could really rise a team above, and I think that\u2019s something huge that I need to take away from my high school career and bring it forward with me to college.\u201d<\/p>\n
First: RAD \u2013 Ertel (Steel), 5:48; Shots-corners: AH 5-0, RAD 7-5; Saves: AH (Davis) 6, RAD (Whitcomb) 5; Records: AH 19-3-1, RAD 19-4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LEHIGHTON \u2014 Abington Heights did what it did all season. The Lady Comets created scoring opportunities, and played…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9761,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[305,178,180,179,726],"class_list":{"0":"post-29136","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scranton","8":"tag-high-school-sports","9":"tag-scranton","10":"tag-scranton-headlines","11":"tag-scranton-news","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}