Lansdale Catholic finally breaks curse, wins first PCL girls soccer title

PHILADELPHIA >> A moment of pure chaos turned into one of pure bliss.

With the ball bouncing around in the box, Lansdale Catholic senior Caroline Cleary knew she couldn’t let Archbishop Ryan clear it and did the only thing she could, bicycle kicking it back into the fray. The moved paid off, the ball found Sarah Fitzpatrick for a tap-in and on the seventh try, the Crusaders girls soccer team won a Philadelphia Catholic League title.

Fitzpatrick’s winner with 11:28 left in the first overtime sent LC past Ryan 1-0 at Northeast High School on Sunday afternoon. For the program’s eight seniors, including Cleary and Fiztpatrick, it was a moment a long time coming.

“I saw the ball and just knew it had to get in the net,” Fitzpatrick said. “I saw an opening and I took it. We all knew you don’t get many scoring opportunities and especially in overtime of a 0-0 game, so we just knew anybody there had to get a body part on it.”

The moment was nearly not to be. After 79 minutes of fairly even and fairly non-threatening regulation, the defending champion Ragdolls almost won the match. Emily Deluisi, Ryan’s terrific attacking midfielder, received a great pass in the box and found a window.

She unleashed a wicked right-footed shot that caused a collective holding of breath.

“I just thought ‘oh my God, it’s going in and this is going to be the end of it,’” LC senior keeper Abby Shuster said. “We weren’t going to be able to come back, there was no time left. It was terrifying. I thought it was over.”

Fate seemed on the Crusaders’ side as Deluisi’s rocket clanged off the crossbar and back into space.

“My first thought was run right to the ball and kick it the heck out of there,” LC senior center back Keira O’Sullivan said. “I have to say, not to be cliché, but I had feeling in my gut and it was different the last three years.”

LC was back in the final for the fourth straight season and seventh time overall but had yet to breakthrough and leave with a hubcap. Even LC first-year coach Bree Benedict noticed something different on the trip down to Northeast.

O’Sullivan noted she was pretty jittery, but she and her teammates must have hid it well because Benedict thought her group was abnormally calm getting ready for the game.

“This is incredible, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with a lot of these seniors at the travel level for so long, so to do it with them just feels so special,” Benedict said. “It’s my first year, but it’s their fourth year chasing this so to watch them celebrate, it means the world to me.”

It was the work of another senior that set up what would be the game-deciding sequence. Emily Schall, who was stellar all afternoon, got taken down deep on Ryan’s flank setting up a free kick that played almost like a corner.

The foul came in the perfect spot for LC junior Taylor Connelly. LC’s set piece specialist, Connelly stepped over the ball and knew if she merely put it in a spot where it could become dangerous, her teammates would make the most of it.

“We had everyone there, it was the end of the game, a last-chance scenario so I put it in a spot people could at least get to it,” Connelly said. “We’ve done a lot of corners and a lot of directs from that area and we’ve worked on being in front of the keeper and making the keeper have to think on those plays, and of course finishing.”

Connelly hit a great ball to the far post that Ryan keeper Emma Joyce got two hands on but not enough to secure it. Kellie Gillen was right on Joyce and had the first crack at it, but a Ragdoll defender was able to knock the ball down and off the line.

The ball went up in the air, where Cleary tracked the pop-up and then went heel-over-head to keep it alive.

“The ball was just bouncing, it kept hitting off and being rejected by defenders, I thought it might have been a handball but the ball just floated over my head so I gave it a bicycle kick back in,” Cleary said. “I couldn’t see anything after that, but I heard my whole team screaming so I thought ‘woo, we won!’

“I was so scared they were going to boot it out, but Sarah got a touch on it and got it in.”

LC had its own share of challenges during the season leading up to Sunday’s crowning moment. Not only did Benedict take over as just the second coach in program history, but the Crusaders had to retool after losing a pretty influential senior class.

There were a lot of changes, from the defensive formation, to Shuster and Grace Cooney sharing time in goal, players taking on different roles and the group growing as a collective.

“We’ve been here all four years so we knew it was time to get the job done,” Cleary said. “We knew it was going to be different, but we’ve played together so much the last four years we’re pretty much like family, so we knew we could get it done.”

In preseason, Benedict asked her players to list individual and team goals. The response for the team’s goal was pretty much the same thing over and over again.

“Everybody’s team goal was 100 percent to get back to the PCL title game and win it,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’ve had a lot of motivation, our coach is very motivational and pushes us and we just wanted this to be our year. We’ve grown a lot, there’s a lot of new players, players stepping up, some new goal scorers and really just everyone trying their best.”

Shuster, who spent her first two seasons at Archbishop Carroll, said the family feeling in the program has been her favorite thing about playing for LC. Even having to split time in goal didn’t matter because Cooney was her biggest supporter and she was the same for her classmate and co-captain.

“We’ve come so far, even from the beginning of playoffs to now, we just came together and were ready for today,” Shuster said. “I feel amazing, I’m sure the rest of them feel even better than me because they were here all four years, but it’s just an incredible feeling. We all trust each other on this team.”

“This means absolutely everything to me,” O’Sullivan said. “Lansdale Catholic has never won the PCL, so to do it my senior year, it’s the best thing I could ever ask for.”

After serving the ball in, Connelly looped around behind the scramble in the box, giving her one of the best views on the field. Once the ball went it, she raised her arms in the air, hopped twice and ran to join the growing swarm of celebrating Crusaders.

“It’s Cloud Nine,” Connelly said. “This is everything we’ve wanted the last three years I’ve been here and for the seniors, their four years. We finally got to be in the position to get the job done.

“It’s really great to break tradition in that sense to overcome that and everything came together this year, we kind of had the perfect storm through the season that brought us here.”

LANSDALE CATHOLIC 1, ARCHBISHOP RYAN 0 (OT)
LANSDALE CATHOLIC 0 0 1 – 0
ARCHBISHOP RYAN 0 0 0 – 0
Goals; LC – Sarah Fitzpatrick (Caroline Cleary)