GCA boys soccer loses in state championship

INDIANAPOLIS

‘Twas well before midnight when the first wheel fell off of Greenwood Christian’s carriage on Friday night. It wiggled off of its axle around 6:27 p.m., when Park Tudor’s Francesco Nofrini scored the first goal in what became an 9-0 rout.

But a loss to the second-ranked Panthers in the Class A boys soccer state championship match at IUPUI can only put so much of a damper on the Cougars’ postseason run, which ranks among the most improbable Cinderella stories in recent Indiana history in any sport.

“It’s been crazy,” said GCA senior Parker Satre, who was presented with the IHSAA’s Mental Attitude Award after the match. “To think that we’re in a state championship game, it’s just really been surreal and I’m really thankful that I got to be a part of something like this. It’s awesome.”

The Cougars (11-8-3), who lost to the Panthers by a similar 8-0 score back on Sept. 6, packed their defense in a little more tightly at the outset with the aim of keeping the match scoreless as long as possible and catching a break on a counterattack. The strategy worked for a while — Park Tudor controlled play for the first 20-plus minutes but couldn’t crack the seal on the goal as GCA keeper Colton Flint stopped the first five shots he faced.

But once the dam broke, the waters overwhelmed the underdog Cougars quickly. Nofrini, who scored two of his 23 regular-season goals against GCA, got Park Tudor on the board with 18:22 left in the first half when he took a pass from David Mokaya and tucked a low left-to-right shot past a diving Flint.

Then, the Panthers (20-2-1) completed the carriage-to-pumpkin changeover with three more goals in a 61-second span. Flint had no chance on Carson Shattuck’s tally, which came on a point-blank attempt off a George Ferguson cross. Nofrini made it 3-0 on a laser into the upper right side of the net with 13:41 on the clock, and Elliott Scotten followed just 15 seconds later with a shot that Flint got a piece of but couldn’t fully stop.

Ferguson scored two more goals in the final 5:18 of the half, including a penalty kick at the 3:25 mark that bumped the lead to 6-0, Mokaya added one at the 1:17 mark and Nofrini capped off the avalanche by scoring his third goal with 15 seconds remaining before an intermission that couldn’t come soon enough for GCA.

Park Tudor finished the half with a 23-0 advantage in total shot attempts, putting 17 of those on frame.

“Our biggest game plan was to lock in, control the middle of the field and be able to counter very quickly,” Greenwood Christian coach Micah Estes said. “It just came down to, we weren’t able to connect passes. We were very nervous; we didn’t connect three passes until 17 minutes (left) in the game. … We put a lot of pressure on ourselves without them having to do much.”

The rush slowed considerably after the break, with the Panthers’ only goal coming from Teddy Kramer in the 77th minute. GCA nearly answered back with a little more than a minute left, but Carson Dillard’s shot caromed off the crossbar and came down just in front of the goal line.

Greenwood Christian didn’t get its first shot until Caden Camden put one on goal in the 50th minute, but that’s been par for the course for Panther opponents of late. Friday’s match was Park Tudor’s seventh consecutive shutout win, and the Panthers have now allowed just two goals over their last 12 matches.

The season-ending loss will sting the Cougars for a little while, but in the end they’ll remember everything else that they accomplished this month after going 3-12 last fall in Estes’ first season and 5-7-3 during this regular season.

The Cougars opened the tournament with wins over Bloomington Lighthouse and Eminence before knocking off host White River Valley in the sectional title match. Getting to that point wasn’t uncharted territory; Greenwood Christian had won five boys soccer sectionals before this year, including three in a row from 2017-19. But this group, the unlikeliest of ball attendees, kept on dancing. It upset No. 20 Oldenburg Academy in the regional semifinal and then No. 16 Southwestern in the final to earn a trip to semistate. Once there, the Cougars pulled off a 1-0 overtime stunner against eighth-ranked Forest Park in Seymour.

“I’d say we all started playing together,” Satre said. “We all started to click. In sectionals, our formations started clicking, we sort of had a few new playing in different positions and we started playing well. … Once we started playing together, we all believed.”

On Friday, GCA filled out the last line on its dance card — making the first state championship game appearance of any kind in school history. And while they couldn’t script the ultimate fairy-tale ending, the Cougars rode away from Michael A. Carroll Track and Soccer Stadium with the memories of a four-week journey for the ages.

And perhaps with a glass slipper still in hand. Though it graduates seven seniors from this storybook squad, Greenwood Christian will head into 2023 with several of its top performers back, more momentum than it’s ever had — and the knowledge of what it takes to dance all the way across that postseason ballroom floor.

“The biggest thing that Park Tudor had was they’ve been here before,” Estes said. “They lost in the final four last year, and so they had players that were experienced and were hungry, where this is the first time that we really ever experienced anything like this. Now, looking ahead, we’ll lose amazing leaders in these seniors, and I don’t want to take anything away from them — but we’ll have a lot of talent, and we’ll continue to grow. We have a lot of freshmen that are going to be very hungry and not want to end our GCA legacy like this.

“It’s a thrill that we even got here, but I think this is just laying the foundation. We’ll continue to make some noise in 1A soccer.”