Boys soccer: St. Edward silenced in state championship game

EAST PEORIA - In most postgame photos with the second-place trophy, the smiles are forced. For the St. Edward boys soccer team, the grins were genuine despite a 2-0 loss to Quincy Notre Dame in the Class 1A State championship game.

"It's weird, it's like they're happy but sad," St. Edward coach Tim Brieger said. "Sometimes a team gets second and it's 'Oh, we get a trophy.'

"The smiles started to appear when they realized what they did. They went 51-4-1 over two years and 70 wins in three years. Show me another program that can match that."

The only problem for the Green Wave (24-2-1) was that they could not match Quincy Notre Dame over the full 80 minutes.

It took just two-plus minutes for Quincy Notre Dame to get on the board when Colby Kapp slid to tap a rolling cross from Peyton Stegeman past St. Edward keeper Evan Sajtar.

"We talked before the game about putting a lot of pressure early on and trying to create some mistakes," Notre Dame coach Greg Reis said.

The goal didn't bother St. Edward, who took the kickoff following the goal down the field only to be snubbed by a diving save from Griffin Kim.

What did bother St. Edward was Notre Dame's height and athleticism. The Irish (21-5-2) were able to keep St. Edward bottled up.

St. Edward's leading scorer Josh Johansen, who tallied 23 goals on the season, was held without a shot in the title game as Notre Dame surrounded him.

"This team knew how to guard me and kept it pretty tight," Johansen, a junior, said. "At least one guy was on me, if not two or three."

Not only did Notre Dame limit Johansen, but they shut down St. Edward's transition.

"Every time I came down the sideline I'd see their player," senior midfielder Zach Olenek said. "I thought I'd be fast enough to get (by), but there would be somebody else there."

Notre Dame added the insurance on Mitchell Murphy's seeing-eye free kick from 28 yards on the left wing in the 36th minute.

The Green Wave played with nothing to lose in the second half, but still could not break through for any offense but played even with Notre Dame.

"My halftime speech didn't even talk about the game," Brieger said. "I said if this is our last hurrah together, let's go out and put on a show and see what we've got. (Notre Dame has) some Division I kids but let's make the fans and the state respect us for what we did."

The Green Wave has certainly caught the attention with back-to-back state trophies after finishing third a year ago. But this team was markedly different from a year ago, which relied heavily on the goal scoring of A.J. Franklin.

"We told them at the start of the season that we have to reinvent ourselves," Brieger said. "We'll have to change who we are. We became a more diverse team and, as the season went on, we said we can do this."

Said Olenek: "I've never had a team like this before. They made this an amazing year for me. I'm glad it was with this team that I played my last game."