For the IHSAA Regional Semifinals game, the Lady Cadets traveled to Covenant Christian High School to play the Lady Crusaders. The Cadets and Crusaders have never played before in a Girls soccer game and tonight’s semi-final winner was expected to play the Park Tudor Panthers in the Regional Finals game on Saturday afternoon. The Cadets entered the game with a record of 9-6-1 and Covenant Christian Crusaders held a record of 11-7-1 and #8 1A state ranking. If you were to compare the Lady Cadets and Lady Crusaders on paper, there would be a clear advantage for the Crusaders. The Cadets had played the easier schedule compared to the brutal schedule that Covenant Christian had played. The Cadets had scored less goals than the Crusaders during the regular season. The Crusaders were a Top 10 team in the Final 1A poll and the Cadets had fallen out of the Top 20 poll after the first week of the season. The only thing stopping a Crusader roll over of the Cadets was the defensive unit that was led by Ava Cook, Laura Cameron, Emily Nava, Ainsley Engel, Katie Guetig, and Zoey Wyneken. With the weather of the game being a breezy mid 50 degrees and the Regional Semifinal game played on an grass field, the Lady Cadets had every excuse to justify not playing well on this late afternoon game. But the Lady Cadets went out and gave it everything they had for 80 minutes but unfortunately lost tonight’s game 1-0. With a strong westernly breeze for the whole game, the Cadets made all efforts to build out an offensive scheme but struggled to do that during the whole first half. The Lady Cadets coaching staff encouraged the team to find any chance to pressure the Crusaders goalie with good shots but remained calm and not panicky due to the lack of offensive efforts by the Cadets in the first half. If you were to combine the strong wind, the technical skill of the Crusaders, and the defensive energy that the Lady Cadets had to put into frustrating the Crusaders for the first half, a 0-0 halftime score was a total win for the Cadets. The 0-0 contest at halftime could be directly attributed to the play of the Cadets’ defense as well as to the starting goalie Zoey Wynkenen. Zoey Wynkenen had significantly improved her goalie skills and confidence as the season had progressed. During today’s Regional Semifinal game, Zoey played her best half of the season and kept giving the Cadets a fighting chance with her brilliant saves. At the start of the second half, the weather made the game even more difficult as a light rain shower slickened up the field. Covenant Christian changed some of their attacking efforts and sought to find more space above the top of the box and shoot from further back. The Lady Cadets goalie adjusted to this change and made a couple of excellent saves that were used to quickly build counter attacks against the Crusaders. Even with some better offensive movements in the second half, the Lady Cadets still had to play an excellent defensive scheme to keep the Lady Crusaders from scoring. Once the Crusaders started to realize that dribbling into the Cadets defense would yield better results, the game clock had would down to only 30:00 remaining. Around the 27:30 mark remaining in the game, the Crusaders broke down the Cadets defense but failed to get a good shot onto the goal. As the soccer ball bounced between Cadet and Crusader players at the top of the penalty box, the Crusaders’ top player on the field found a way to get her foot onto the ball and drove a good shot into the lower right corner of the Cadets goal. This 1-0 lead for the Crusaders changed the pace of the entire game. The Cadets were now forced into a more aggressive pattern of play and the new pattern opened up the Cadets for more defensive pressure from Covenant if they saw the open spaces. However, the Crusaders didn’t capitalize on this and pulled some of their better players back on the field to defend their goal. As the Cadets were able to find a few attacking moments of pressure against Covenant Christian, these moments quickly faded as Covenant cleared the ball out of bounds and killed the Cadets momentum. It wasn’t until the last seconds of the game did the Cadets have an excellent opportunity to score on the Covenant goal. With :11 seconds left on the game clock, the Cadets were awarded a direct kick just outside of the penalty box. Once the Cadets asked the game official to measure out the space needed to take the kick, the last second effort from the Cadets to score a game tying goal fell into the side of the net and the game clock expired. The game ended with the anticipated victory for Covenant Christian but the final score was much closer than many people anticipated at 1-0. The 1-0 loss for the Lady Cadets ends their season with a record of 9-7-1. Covenant Christian’s record now stands at 12-7-1 and the Crusaders move onto the Regional Finals at Knightstown HS against 1A #1 Park Tudor High School. Game Summary Cascade 0 - 0 0 Covenant Christian 0 - 1 0