The Lady Cadets soccer team (6-4, 4-1 ICC) hosted 2A #17 Speedway Lady Sparkplugs (9-2-2, 4-1 ICC) tonight with a chance to win 2nd place in the ICC standings. The Cadets and Sparkplugs are the two most recent ICC champions (2021 Cadets, 2022 Sparkplugs) and both teams are looking to end the season on positive notes as they start to look ahead at the IHSAA Sectional competition. With a critical win over Cardinal Ritter on Tuesday night, the Lady Cadets set up a chance to earn second place in the ICC when they played the Lady Sparkplugs. The Sparkplugs were having another solid season and had remained in the top 20 rankings for most of the year despite losing strong players from last year’s ICC championship team. The Cadets had played strong on Tuesday night but knew that tonight’s opponent, Speedway, would include faster players and a better offensive unit. At the start of the game, the Cadets chose to try and keep the ball in front of them and make Speedway try and dribble the ball more than they wanted. The Sparkplugs had scored over 50 goals on the season and the Cadets knew that a shoot-out mentality would definitely favor the Sparkplugs. The new formation did exactly what it was intended to do and forced Speedway to shoot far before they wanted to allowing the Cadets goalie to gobble up easy and weak Speedway shots. At the same time the Cadets offense was finding some interesting break away opportunities that surprised the Sparkplugs and made Speedway play defense enough that their attacking ryhthm was thrown off. None of these attacks created a goal for the Cadets but the scoring opportunities were very good and built up some confidence in that what the Cadets were doing would work. The first half ended 0-0 with both teams putting about 5 quality shots on target. The first 10:00 minutes of the second half were played in the same formation that was used in the first half and the game remained scoreless. As the physical conditioning of the Cadets and the Sparkplugs started to show, the Lady Cadets coaching staff decided to adjust the team formation to create more attacking attempts and this slowly shifted the game in favor of the Sparkplugs. With fewer players in the midfield, Cascade’s defensive players had to cover more area to keep the soccer ball moving forward. This formation change did throw off the Cascade attacking rhythm for a couple of minutes but did yield some really good scoring opportunities that were stopped by the Speedway goalie. The scoreless game was finally broken when Speedway was able to poke a ball past the Cascade goalie on a corner kick that fell just short of the goal. A bad bounce off of the goalie went right into the knee of the streaking Speedway player. With a 1-0 lead for Speedway and around 19:00 left in the game, the Cadets knew that they needed to put their best effort together in the last minutes of the game to get a game tying goal. Despite the Cadets best efforts, the game remained 1-0 until the last two minutes of the game when the Lady Sparkplugs struck a free kick from nearly 30 yards out that went right through the Cascade goalie’s hands. With the score now 2-0 in favor of the Sparkplugs both teams played out the last 2:00 of the game by passing the ball around and occasionally knocking it out of bounds. The game ended in a 2-0 victory for Speedway. The 2-0 loss to the Lady Sparkplugs ends the Lady Cadets regular season with a record of 6-5-1. The Cadets 4-2 record in the ICC won them 3rd place in the conference standings. The Lady Sparkplugs end their regular season with a record of 10-2-2 and they secured a 2nd place finish in the ICC standings with this evening’s victory. The Lady Cadets now look ahead to the Sectional competition that will start next week at Southmont High School. The Cadets drew the host school in the first game of the tournament and the winner of the game will then play the Greencastle Lady Tiger Cubs in the second round of the Sectional competition. The Cadets lost to the Lady Mounties 2-1 just over a week ago and look to rebound from that tough loss with positive thoughts about the team’s improvement over the past couple of weeks. Game Summary Cascade 0 - 0 0 Speedway 0 - 2 2