Edmonds-Woodway falls to Garfield in soccer playoff game

Published 8:09 pm Saturday, May 14, 2011

SEATTLE — Six weeks ago the Edmonds-Woodway High School boys soccer team never could have imagined being in the position they found themselves Saturday.

At that point the Warriors were 1-6-1 in their first eight games and thoughts weren’t toward the postseason, but rather toward mere respect

ability. Yet, a second-half turnaround followed by an improbable postseason run had Edmonds-Woodway one win away from the state tournament.

Alas, all runs must eventually come to an end, and Edmonds-Woodway’s ground to a halt Saturday afternoon when Garfield outclassed the Warriors and emphatically ended their season with a 4-0 victory in the Class 4A District 1-2 play-in game at Nathan Hale High School.

Edmonds-Woodway and Garfield were the No. 3 teams from Wesco and Kingco, respectively, and state had room for just one. The Bulldogs used a convincing performance to claim that spot.

“That’s a quality team,” Edmonds-Woodway coach Tony Gilman said of the Bulldogs. “We can’t feel bad about what we’ve done. We won one game in the first eight, then we turned it around and did everything we did in the second half. We changed some things, they sucked it up and played harder, and it got us to this.”

Garfield (15-2-1) advanced to the state round of 16, where the Bulldogs face the No. 3 team from District 3-4, which encompasses south Puget Sound and southwest Washington.

Edmonds-Woodway, which knocked out Wesco North powerhouses Marysville-Pilchuck and Snohomish en route to Saturday’s game, finished its season 7-12-1.

The Warriors ran into the Aaron Kovar show Saturday. Kovar, a junior forward and the state’s Gatorade Player of the Year, showed off some spectacular skills on his way to a two-goal, two-assist performance for which Edmonds-Woodway had no answer.

Erik Whitney, the Warriors’ senior goalkeeper, did everything he could to stem the tide, making some stunning stops among his eight saves. But Garfield had too much for Edmonds-Woodway to handle.

“They’re very good,” Gilman said. “I think Mariner is the only team from our league that could give them a run for their money, and that may be a stretch. Their possession is very good, and now we know why (Kovar) is the Gatorade Player of the Year.”

Josh Canova and Eddie Dorland scored the other goals for Garfield.

Though Edmonds-Woodway’s season came to an end, the Warriors were proud of the way they were able to turn their season around.

“We definitely pulled it together,” said Whitney, who starred in Edmonds-Woodway’s 1-0 shootout victory over Snohomish on Thursday that got the Warriors to Saturday’s winner-to-state, loser-out contest. “The biggest thing that came together was the chemistry. The first half of the season we had a lot of players coming from very different backgrounds, from rec soccer and select soccer. That kind of put a wall between some of the players as far as trust on the field. The second half of the season that wall came down, we started to get together and we were playing a lot better off each other. As a result we played a lot better and produced the results we needed.”

But that togetherness wasn’t enough to overcome the talented Bulldogs.

Though Garfield controlled play from the start, the Warriors managed to hold the Bulldogs at bay for 25 minutes. But Garfield finally found the breakthrough thanks to Kovar. Kovar danced across the edge of the penalty box before playing an audacious back-heeled through ball into the path of Canova, who slotted past Whitney to open the scoring.

The Bulldogs then put the game away with two goals in the final five minutes of the first half. Kovar raced onto a through ball, stopped on a dime, spun and fired into the far corner to make it 2-0. Then moments later Kovar beat his marker and was tripped up for a penalty kick. He converted himself to up the advantage to three.

Edmonds-Woodway was able to slow the Bulldogs down better in the second half — though Garfield twice hit the woodwork. But the Bulldogs put a final stamp on the game in the 70th minute when Dorland headed in Kovar’s free kick from the edge of the box at the far post.