SHORELINE — The Shorewood girls soccer team left Thursday night’s tilt against Mountlake Terrace in the best situation it could have asked for.
Senior midfielder Ameila Severn put together a hat trick for the Stormrays as they downed Mountlake Terrace 4-0.
In addition to a dominant win over a fellow Wesco 3A/2A postseason threat, Shorewood (14-1, 14-0) clinched the league title.
“I’m absolutely beyond excited,” Shorewood head coach Brooke Pingrey said after the win. “We have a hot end of the season where we have to play two of the best teams in our league (Terrace and Shorecrest). I was hoping we would go out there and play how we know we can, and they absolutely did. They were phenomenal.”
Shorecrest (13-2, 12-2) lost 1-0 to Arlington on the same night, eliminating the chance of a de facto league title match between the Shoreline School District rivals in next Tuesday’s regular-season finale.
After Terrace senior Morgan Damschen came up just short on a breakaway opportunity in the 15th minute, Severn took over and weaved her way through three defenders for her first of three goals in the 20th minute, delivering the others in the 38th and 64th minutes.
In the 32nd, sophomore forward Diana Tuilevuka chipped in her lone score.
“We’re extremely blessed as a team to have the two of them and we have multiple others as well,” Pingrey said. “Just such technically gifted players. You don’t come across it very often and you definitely don’t often have two, three or four players that are that gifted and play well off each other. .. I can’t really say enough about how awesome it is.”
The Hawks registered just three shots on goal to a Stormrays defensive unit that has allowed just three goals on the year (0.3 per contest).
“I think a lot of it was psychological at the beginning,” assistant coach Dino Aristides said. “We know we’re playing a really, really good team and I think it just psyched us out. But, we had the chances to score in the beginning of the game before they did, and we didn’t convert that. That would have changed the psychology of the game.”
Terrace (10-4-1, 10-3-1) came into the contest having won seven of its last eight games and sits in third place in the 16-team league behind both Shoreline schools.
“This is what the playoffs will be like,” Aristides said. “Now that we’ve experienced this, I think we would do a lot better. Because we have a lot of talent on our team, we just didn’t get going.”
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