FRANCONIA — Junior midfielder Julia Blair insists there’s no bad blood between her Souderton Indians crew and the Central Bucks South Titans.
The girls from CB South, bruised and beaten up, may feel differently.
When these teams last met, at the end of August, the Titans were at home and edged Souderton in a knock-down, drag-out brawl that went to overtime, 2-1.
Thursday night, with Columbus Day weekend approaching, Blair seemed to be everywhere under the lights of Indian Field in the teams’ SOL Colonial Division rematch, scoring the game’s lone goal as Big Red fought past CB South 1-0 in a contest that was even more physical than the last.
Souderton (7-5-1), which began the season with five losses, extended its torrid winning streak to seven games while snapping a six-game streak by the Titans (8-4).
“I think both teams came out and were super aggressive to the ball, and it made it a really fun, competitive game,” Blair said. “I think it’s great when teams are able to compete that way.
“They’re in our (division) and it’s always competitive with them.”
In the closing minutes, the Indians withstood a flurry of CB South threats in front of their own net. As Titans players walked off the field infuriated, many feeling their bodies battered in the heat of the moment, there were murmurs of “dirty play” and “don’t stoop to their level.”
But CB South coach Kelli Chioffe took a more philosophical view.
“They were after us and they did a great job,” said Chioffe, who is in her first year at the helm. “They were double- and triple-teaming us, and we couldn’t get out of it.
“It just felt like the odds were against us today,” she said. “Our bus was late. We didn’t get a proper warmup. I know that’s no excuse, but honestly, I think that could have been part of it. But they were just a little more fired up than we were, because they were gunning for us.”
Blair’s score came off a corner 3 minutes, 38 seconds into the second period.
“Ashley Paturzo made a beautiful insert,” Blair said. “Originally the corner didn’t go as planned, it had a little bit of a fumble, but I just wanted to get a shot off the best I could. So I just pulled it to my reverse and shot it. I was just taking the space I had.
“It felt like a good shot,” she said. “It came off clean.”
Titans keeper Emma Kraft was kept busy, stopping six of seven shots on goal. Big Red’s Meredith DeMarzio saw just three shots in net, thanks to her squad’s stifling defense and repeated push on the offensive end.
The Indians had seven penalty corners while CB South had six.
“The first game against them was great, and we feel like we’ve improved a lot since then, but I have to say, CB South has improved a lot too,” Souderton coach Sue Casciato said. “That’s not the same team we faced six weeks ago. It was definitely physical tonight, they were super quick to the ball, and the game was very evenly matched.
“We’re always swarming the ball,” Casciato said. “That was our plan at the beginning of the year, we just forgot to do it. We did too much watching at the beginning of the year. Now, we realize, we have to match other teams’ aggression for us to be successful.”
The turning point in the Indians’ season was a mid-September, 8-2 blowout loss to CB West, one of the top teams in the area. Big Red was down 6-0 when the first-half buzzer blared.
“I said at halftime, ‘We’re probably not going to win this game, but we need to just start over,’” Casciato said. “We went out and scored two in the second half and (CB West) scored two, and the girls were like, ‘Oh, we can hang with good teams.’”
Souderton lost four key seniors from a team that went 18-5 last year. It also lost Ava Jones — who led the league with 34 goals in 2022 — to an ACL tear she suffered playing lacrosse last spring.
“We’re a very young team overall, and it took us some time to come together,” Casciato said. “We’re still not as consistent as we’d like to be, but hopefully we’re heading in the right direction.”
CB South, despite an impressive run through the first part of the division schedule, is trying to find more consistency of its own.
“I think we have to keep working harder,” Chioffe said. “Yesterday, we didn’t have a great practice, so I think we just have to keep focusing every day. We have to try to get the ball out on defense. They kept shutting us down in that back corner, so we definitely need to work on that.”
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Email Christiaan DeFranco at cdefranco@thereporteronline.com. Follow him on Twitter/X at @the_defranc, or visit https://ChrisDeFranco.com.
