St. Charles East blanks Streamwood
The lack of ball movement for No. 1 seed St. Charles East against a pesky, physical Streamwood squad sure didn’t seem to stop the Fighting Saints.
East just made up for it with smart passes on two key advances in front of the net that turned to gold.
Especially, the unselfish passes that were mirror-images of each other from Taylor Ortiz and Andrew Shone helped Eric Dietrich and TC Hull notch first-half goals en route to a 4-0 St. Charles East (19-2-1) win over the No. 4 seed Sabres (13-8) in a Class 3A York sectional semifinal in Elmhurst Tuesday.
East advances to Friday’s sectional championship against No. 3 Larkin Friday at 4:30 p.m. Larkin beat South Elgin 2-1 in PKs in Tuesday’s second semifinal.
“We really didn’t give up any strong chances against us,” East coach Paul Jennison said. “So it was certainly good to come away with a win. You do the job you got to do to win the semifinal. That’s your main objective. We took care of it and very proud of them tonight. We’ve had the weapons up top to put the ball away.”
Dietrich’s goal in the 12th minute from Ortiz, who sent one near the right post, caused goaltender Phil Lewy to sweep from his right to his left and miss, gave East the 1-0 lead.
Hull’s tap-in near the right post in the 33rd minute made it a 2-0, goals the product of precision passing that began on the outside.
“I received the ball from Jake Sterling and brought it down the line,” Ortiz. “I’m always looking up the line and picking my head up to see, looking across the box to see if anyone was there. I saw (Kevin) Kurtz, Hull and Dietrich across the box and I just played it across hoping that one of them would get a touch on it.
Hull scored his 28th on an identical pass.
“We got to the outside and put it across the box and its kind of our goal because we get the outside-mids putting crosses which is good because we got a lot of people on the outside,” Hull said. “Shone put a good ball over the top, just crossed the box and I patted it down to myself and saw the goalie come out and kind of chipped it over and it went in.”
Kurtz tapped in his own rebound in the 58th minute and Zach Manibog added the dagger off a rebound late in the second half.
They just outplayed us,” Streamwood coach Matt Polovin said. “Every time we tried to make a final pass, it was right to them. We just couldn’t connect with anything today. Everything we tried to do that we did all season we just couldn’t get it to finish. They’re an excellent team, we just got outplayed.”