By Bob Nuse, Sports Editor
The Allentown High School girls’ soccer team entered last Saturday night’s Mercer County Tournament final at Rider University with every intention of winning.
And while the Redbirds fell short of that goal by the slimmest of margins, they came away from their 2-1 loss to Pennington with plenty to be proud of. Allentown battled Pennington, which has now win six straight MCT titles, to a tie for 100 minutes before falling on penalty kicks.
“What we can take away from this is that going into the state tournament we can hang with anybody,” said Allentown coach Coleen Weber, whose team had its nine-game winning streak snapped. “If we can hang with Pennington for 100 minutes then what are we capable of doing in the state tournament?
“What I take away from this is, one, we didn’t give up. Two, we showed the pride in ourselves to come back out there and get a goal in the second half. And three, just to stay together and defend because their forwards are so dangerous. And for us to never break, that speaks of the character of our defense.”
Allentown fell behind midway through the first half when Pennington’s Erica Murphy scored. From that point on the Redbirds went toe-to-toe with the Red Raiders and outplayed them for large portions of the second half, evening the score when Alex Moore scored off an assist from Juliana Valesi with 20:44 left in the second half.
The game stayed tied through the rest of regulation and all of overtime before Pennington won in PKs, 4-3.
“It is a shame it had to end the way it did,” said Weber, whose team fell to 15-2-1 on the season. “I give a lot of credit to their team. They have a really good team and played well the whole game. We kind of took a half off. I think they gave us some confusion at the beginning of the game and then we solved it at halftime and it wasn’t an issue any more.
“Part of it not having the experience of being in this position and maybe being a little overwhelmed. And then we realized we could hang with them. They came out firing and I think it is kind of easy to fall back on your heels. I think we did a really good job of staying together during that 40 minutes of chaos or whatever it was and coming into the second half with confidence and going right at them.”
With Amanda Hornyak in goal and a strong defense in front of her, the Redbirds turned away a strong Pennington offense that had 17 shots in the game.
“The girls stepped up and they wanted to win,” Weber said. “They laid it on the line those last 10 minutes and did everything I asked them to do. We wanted to win this game.”
The Redbirds are the No. 4 seed in the Central Jersey Group III tournament and will open play against 13th-seeded Nottingham. The state tournament was scheduled to begin Monday but the entire tournament is now subject to rescheduling game due to the weather that came through the area earlier in the week.