For being deep into the PIAA playoffs, Northwestern Lehigh had an short trip for their state semifinal game Tuesday night, heading down Route 309 to Emmaus’ Memorial Field to face Allentown Central Catholic in a rematch of the District 11 championship.
Senior players stepped up on both sides of the field for the Tigers as they beat the Vikettes 2-1 to earn the program’s first ever trip to the state championship game Saturday in Mechanicsburg.
Seniors Brook Balliet and Paige Bissell led the offense while classmates Syenna Flores and Olivia Spatz turned in big performances defensively for Northwestern.
Balliet is no stranger to coming up with big goals in the postseason. In each of her first three seasons Balliet scored a goal in the district championship with two of those goals coming in 1-0 Northwestern victories and the other coming in a 3-2 championship win.
Two of those goals also gave the Lady Tigers wins over Central Catholic.
For her senior season Balliet opened the scoring for her team just 3:27 into the game when she took a ball that was played through from the backfield by Sophia Sikora, kicked it backwards over her head and then spun around to chase it toward the goal. She fired from about 10 yards out for a 1-0 lead.
Balliet performed the heroics with a defender close on either side of her and placed the shot to the upper part of the net and out of reach of goalie Lindsey Yen.
“Sophia always does a good job of getting balls into the attack zone and she gave me a perfect ball that I was able to play and make something out of,” said Balliet. “It all started with her feed.”
Just 14 second later the Vikettes’s Meredith Eisenmann came down the right side and rather than firing at the near corner, pushed a shot to the far corner and out of reach of goalie Olivia Reinhart to tie the game at 1-1.
Both teams can play defense as well as any team and they showed that through the rest of the first half and into the second.
Both goalkeepers also came up with saves to keep the game at 1-1 through the first 11 minutes of the second half.
At that point, Bissell maneuvered to work through the Central Catholic defense and was guarded by senior Emma Wells, whose knee appeared to buckle as she turned to make a play on Bissell. The Northwestern senior continued toward the goal and fired from 18 yards out, beating Yen with a ball toward the left side of the goal for a 2-1 Northwestern lead.
“I was initially looking for Sophia (Schaffer) on a through run,” said Bissell. “But it was deflected off of a Central defender and I knew I had the shot, so I took it on my left foot, which is my weak foot, but I had confidence in it, and it went low and to the back post.”
The Northwestern defense continued to do its work the rest of the way as Central Catholic looked for a way to tie the game but was turned away. The Lady Tigers had allowed just 10 goals all season and had allowed more than one goal only twice this season.
“We take a lot of pride in our defense,” said Spatz. “You don’t win games by giving up a lot of goals and we all work well together and have put in the work we need to do that makes us as good as we are. We played really well tonight and we’re all proud of how we have played to help the team get to where we are.”
The trip to the finals will be the first for the program, which has now played in four semifinal games.
The Lady Tigers will play Erie’s Cathedral Prep (20-2-1), the District 10 champion, who defeated District 7 champion Quaker Valley 1-0 in the other semifinal on Tuesday night.
The 2A finals for boys and girls will both have the same schools – Northwestern Lehigh and Cathedral Prep – playing each other for the state championship.
“We call New Tripoli ‘Titletown,’ so to make it to the finals for the first time kind makes that fit even more,” said Bissell. “Then, to have both the boys team and the girls teams going to the finals makes it even more so.”