Libertyville wins NSC Lake title

Libertyville’s boys soccer team won the North Suburban Lake Division title outright with a 1-0 victory over host Lake Zurich on Tuesday night.

Cameron Fragassi scored the game-winning goal and Austin Bitta picked up the assist.

Bitta also was assessed a red card for an attempted handball, as he directed the ball into the goal in the second half. That left the Wildcats with 10 players for the last 19 minutes; Bitta will miss the North Suburban Conference championship game featuring Round Lake (16-2-1) at Libertyville (13-2-1) at 7 p.m. Thursday.

The Wildcats finished the Lake Division with a 5-0-1 record, just ahead of Stevenson (4-1-1).

“Going undefeated is great stuff,” Libertyville coach Andy Bitta said. “But now we’ve got to come up with something for Thursday night.”

The Wildcats scored in the 55th minute when Fragassi, a sophomore, took a feed from Austin Bitta.

“I saw (Austin) Bitta dribbling the ball in the center,” said Fragassi on his third goal of the season. “I made the run and he laid the ball into me. It was a huge goal for the team to get into the championship game.”

Lake Zurich (6-9-3, 3-3) played with a strong defensive effort and made sure Libertyville didn’t have too many scoring opportunities. The Bears managed to hold their own with five defenders in the back.

“Lake Zurich knew what we had,” Andy Bitta said. “They were defensively minded. We did have some scoring opportunities.”

The Bears’ defense included James Blasko, Colin Foote, Ian Hesch, Dan Ross and Danny Suerth.

“Libertyville had a lot of speed up at forward,” Blasko said. “We basically let up one chance, and that was it. We just made sure that we were marking up the their guys.”

Lake Zurich has been in plenty of 1-goal losses this season, but the Bears seem to be an improved team the last couple of weeks.

“We’ve been in a lot of those games,” Lake Zurich coach Michael Schmitz said. “Our boys did a great job and we had scoring opportunities. We were just not able to put them away. That’s been the case sometimes when we come down to these 1-goal games.”

Libertyville keeper Alec Schory earned his fifth shutout of the season with 6 stops.