Girls soccer: Warren turns the tables on Mundelein
Not more than a week ago Mundelein had the best of Warren in 2-0 in regular season play. But on Tuesday the girls soccer postseason started with a rematch at hand and it was a grueling match up of two North Suburban Conference schools.
Seventh-seeded Warren recovered from the previous matchup and got past No. 10 Mundelein 4-1 in the Class 3A regional semifinal in Libertyville.
The Blue Devils (12-8-3) earned their way to play No. 2 Libertyville (13-6) in the regional final Friday at 5:30 p.m.
Libertyville rolled past visiting Wheeling 8-0 in the other semifinal on Tuesday.
What Warren did so well in the early going was to score twice in the opening 10 minutes of play.
"It's huge, especially for us lately, we're trying to get goals in spurts," Warren coach Ryan McCabe said. "So for us to get a goal early it builds everybody's confidence. It's definitely great for the mentality and confidence to get the early goals. It definitely helped tonight."
Another help for Warren was a change over the last couple of games, seeing Annika Attiah move from the back line on defense into the midfield. She was on the receiving part of the first two Blue Devils' goals and they were her first 2 goals of the season.
"The team works well with every pass we make," Attiah said. "Every time we make a pass we move off the ball so that we can be in the open spots. We get the through balls and put them into the net. I think, I work better in the middle attacking. It's kind of new to me, because I'm normally on the defensive side."
Attiah scored the opening Warren goal in the seventh minute off a pass from Ella Skelton.
Then she followed up with another goal three minutes later off a great service from Florida Southern-bound Courtney Chomko that put the Blue Devils up 2-0.
Mundelein recovered to cut the lead to 2-1 in the 17th minute when Kate Hay sent a ball under the crossbar off a pass from Gigi Sahagun.
Warren found two other goals in the second half. Cate Cullison scored in the 58th minute after taking a pass from Emily Soriaga. Then the other Blue Devils' goal was in the 70th minute. Chomko found the back of the net off a through ball from Elizabeth Weinberg.
"It's tough. We had great group of seniors," Mundelein coach Heather Crawford said. "We got a brilliant goal from Kate. It put us right back in it. It just wasn't our night and credit to Warren. Good side and good team. It's tough and a great group of seniors."
Mundelein had put together a great run at the end of the regular season going 6-1-1.
"We had a good stretch of wins going into this game," Crawford said. "We thought it was a game of soccer, sometimes it's your night and tonight just wasn't. Still proud of this group and there's not many senior classes in the state quite like mine."