Girls Soccer: Balanced Benet knocks off St Viator

Updated: May 8, 2012 10:41PM

Benet likely will not win the East Suburban Catholic Conference championship, but it secured a nice consolation prize Tuesday night by knocking visiting St. Viator out of the race with a 3-1 victory at Benedictine University.

Four teams were still alive Tuesday, but now Nazareth (15-0-2, 6-0-2) can win its first ESCC title by beating Providence on Wednesday. Should Nazareth lose, an unlikely prospect, then Benet (14-4-3, 7-1-1) and Carmel (12-3-1, 7-1-1) will share the crown.

“Viator obviously is always a conference rival and everyone came in really hyped up,” Benet senior Jamei Borges said. “We came in with so much energy that we almost got ourselves out of the game.

“We have a solid team of players when we play our game and we were kind of getting into Viator’s style of play, which is hustling. They’re just a strong team running the ball, but once we settled the ball down and actually moved it and played our style, it definitely benefitted us.”

The Lions (9-7-4, 5-1-2) controlled their destiny as they would have clinched at least a share of the conference championship by winning their last two games. They actually controlled much of the action in the first half before the St. Louis-bound Borges scored her 11th goal of the season on a breakaway with 7:26 left in the first half after being sprung by a great pass from Catherine Caniglia.

“I thought Caniglia-to-Borges was one of the best goals I’ve seen this year,” Benet coach Bob Gros said. “Jamei Borges played a great game. She was holding balls, she was beating people in the penalty area. She was really a handful for them.”

The Redwings made it 2-0 at the 25:24 mark of the second half when Colleen Lewellyan headed home a corner kick from Madie Burke.

St. Viator responded by taking control of the final 20 minutes. Chloe Luthringhausen took a pass from Katelyn Hammarlund and scored her ninth goal of the season with 13:04 remaining, tucking a shot from a sharp angle just under the crossbar.

The Lions continued to put pressure on, but Benet freshman goalie Emma Hlavin saved a long shot from Liz Graff with 5:20 to go and a shot from the right wing by Luthringhausen rolled just wide of the left post at the 3:10 mark.

Burke then finished the scoring by ripping a 35-yard free kick into the upper left corner with 21 seconds remaining.

“They pounced on every mistake that we made,” said Hammarlund, who will play with Borges at St. Louis in the fall. “We made very few mistakes but the mistakes we did make, they countered us right away and we were slow to recover. We have to work on picking it up earlier than the last 15 minutes, because we should always do it from the start of the game.”

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