And the strategy against players like Stewartville leading scorer Cole Kropp? \u201cWe circled those guys\u2019 names. We know who they are,\u201d Hess said.<\/p>\n
After St. Cloud Cathedral\u2019s Drew Lesnau scored the only goal of the game in the first half, fed by Minnesota\u2019s all-time leading goal scorer, Jacob Oliver, the remaining minutes were full of headers and missed chances. The Crusaders (19-1-1) kept control of the ball most of the time with junior defender Jack Ziemann finding pockets in the midfield and Oliver routinely placing his head in scoring range, but nothing could extend their lead.<\/p>\n
Oliver, who was embraced postgame by the player whose scoring record he broke this season, Jake Makela of Mankato West, was Hess\u2019 most useful and versatile chess piece.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll I can do to help the team win is what I want to do,\u201d Oliver said. \u201cSo if that\u2019s me sitting back there, winning headers, back there clearing the ball, that\u2019s all I can do. Then I\u2019ll do it. If I need to go score goals, I\u2019ll do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stewartville senior Matthew Watters said the Tigers (20-1-0) never felt defeated during their first trip to state.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the important thing to note is that, yeah, we conceded early on, but I don\u2019t think that changed our game too much,\u201d he said. \u201cI think that speaks to us as a team, two really good teams out there. They get an early goal, but that really didn\u2019t dictate how we played the rest of the game, and that speaks to the character and constructiveness out on the field.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"And the strategy against players like Stewartville leading scorer Cole Kropp? \u201cWe circled those guys\u2019 names. We know…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258390,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-258389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}