Gig Harbor knocks Edmonds-Woodway out of state soccer tourney

EDMONDS — Edmonds-Woodway came into the Class 4A state soccer tournament hot.

The Warriors had won nine of their past 10 games and were coming off a district championship. The Gig Harbor Tides, meanwhile, had not been to state since 2007 and hadn’t won a state playoff game since 2003 — against Edmonds-Woodway.

Maybe it was an omen for the Tides.

Gig Harbor ousted Edmonds-Woodway 5-1, and it was the Tides, not the Warriors, who looked like the team on the roll as of late.

“I think we were not as clean across the back as we have been most of the season,” Edmonds-Woodway coach Bill LeCompte said. “With the run that we have been on, uncharacteristically we didn’t do well defensively. I think that they are a good team. They are really good at redirection and attacking down the middle and it gave us fits a better part of the first half.”

Gig Harbor moves on to play the winner of today’s game between Issaquah and Todd Beamer, while the Warriors’ season ended.

The two teams played nearly the first 30 minutes of the game scoreless. The Tides were the more aggressive team for the first 25 minutes, having two legitimate scoring threats. The Warriors responded as the aggressor in the last 15 minutes.

But it was when the Warriors picked up their offensive attack that they gave up the game’s first goal.

Gig Harbor’s Toria Southworth scored in the 30th minute on a Kate Frame assist to give the Tides a 1-0 lead. The Warriors stayed aggressive for the final minutes of the first half, but Gig Harbor was able to take its slim lead into halftime.

“I thought out of halftime we did a pretty good job of responding to what went down,” LeCompte said.

But the Tides kept pushing in the second half, breaking through again in the 52nd minute when Kailyn Tovey scored, assisted by Mo Megson. Gig Harbor’s Celia Vaughn added another goal in the 57th minute to give the Tides a 3-0 lead.

“When we are fighting so hard and fighting so hard and they get that second one on us, that is when it’s like, that’s the gut check time,” LeCompte said. “I think overall we did a pretty good job. The reality is we got back into it. We got back into the attack and we started to find stuff and their ability to counterattack caught us, obviously it caught us a few times.”

The Warriors finally got on the scoreboard in the 64th minute when Hannah Theuesen scored off a corner kick, assisted by Savannah VanCitters.

But the Tides didn’t let up, scoring twice more. Vaughn added an unassisted goal in the 68th minute and Mackenzie Tovey scored unassisted in the 69th minute to provide the four-goal margin of victory.

“Gig Harbor is a good team,” LeCompte said. “They are going to give whoever they see a fit because being aggressive and being able to redirect the way that they did, it’s going to catch a lot of teams out of sorts defensively.

“It definitely messed with us all night.”

Aubrey Lindberg played goalkeeper for the Tides. Kiera Towell was the goalkeeper for the Warriors (12-6-2).

For a team that started the season slow and then surged through its final 12 games, this certainly wasn’t the way Warriors wanted it to end. Yet despite E-W’s premature exit from the state tournament, LeCompte had nothing but praise for his team.

“I couldn’t be more proud of my team,” LeCompte said. “They have come out every night and given their heart and soul to it and the reality is the hole that we dug out of, it just shows the character of our squad.”

Aaron Lommers covers prep sports for The Herald. Read his live blogs at www.heraldnet.com/prepzone, follow him on twitter @aaronlommers and contact him at aaronlommers@gmail.com.