MANCHESTER – Kylie Wiest knew her next shot might be her last, so she went and won a state title with it.
The Archbishop Wood senior had spent a good amount of her time on the ball in Friday night’s PIAA Class 2A title match at Northeastern High School driving at Burrell’s defenders but nothing to show for it. So when overtime started and the true finality of her high career set in, Wiest determined if she got another look, she’d leave no regrets behind it.
Wiest curled in the match-winner six minutes into overtime, lifting the Vikings to a 2-1 win over the Bucs and delivering the program its first state in girls’ soccer.
“I knew it was overtime so whatever chance I had, I had to finish it,” Wiest said. “I just knew it could have been my last shot. I had to make it count.
“I can’t process it right now, it’s just crazy.”
The Vikings spent a half and roughly half of a second half trying to find themselves Friday. Their usual ability to connect passes, possess the ball and generate chances just wasn’t there against Burrell, the WPIAL runner-up, which was partly on the Bucs’ organized defense and partly on Wood just not playing like itself.
Save for a free kick by senior Paige Eckert that had sailed high and a half-chance off the NJIT commit’s foot, the Vikings didn’t have much to show for their work at halftime. If not for a couple timely saves by junior Cat Gabel, the latter on a well-hit free kick in the final minute, Burrell easily could have taken a lead into the break.
Instead, Wood got a reprieve but still needed a little more time to figure things out.
“The first half, we didn’t have the ball much and the girls looked a little frustrated,” Wood coach Maria Kosmin said. “We talked about how we had to get back to our game, get back to being on the ball and make them chase a little bit. They were frustrated, but once they calmed down, it’s a big game and the nerves kick in so we had to get past that.
“We knew we weren’t going to get tons of opportunities but the one opportunity we got, we finished.”
Wood started to look more potent in the attack with about 25 minutes left in the first half and stayed in that mode the rest of the way. While the attack needed some time to warm up, Wood’s defensive unit put together a pretty strong 80-plus minutes, championed by the efforts of left back Macie Kennedy.
The senior, a co-captain, drew the assignment of marking Burrell’s top scorer in junior Makiah Buchak. Buchak had speed and plenty of technical ability but she also couldn’t seem to find a way past Kennedy.
“She was really fast, so I just kind of forced her outside because I also knew she’s very technical and tries to cut through a lot, so the goal was to keep her in front of me,” Kennedy said. “I just didn’t want to let her dribble past me, so that’s what I did.
“It’s definitely from being a senior, going into each of these last four games, I just kept thinking ‘this isn’t my last game, I do not want this to be my last game,’ so anything I needed to do, I did.”
Kennedy wasn’t the only stout one in the back. The senior lauded the efforts of sophomore center backs Leah O’Neill and Molly McConnell and of course, her partner on the other flank in senior co-captain Brigid Johnston, who made plenty of timely tackles at right back.
“It’s our chemistry,” Kennedy said. “We all work really well together and keep each other up when we’re down. If someone makes a bad mistake, we just keep pushing through.”
Kosmin, in her second year at Wood, tries to be adaptive to what her players are seeing through the course of a match. This fall, she would routinely rotate pieces at the top of Wood’s formation whether it was swapping wingers with the center forward or flipping the “nine” spot with the attacking mid but she’d also make changes if the forward players felt like they had advantages somewhere.
Friday, there was a lot of back and forth between the front line and the bench, especially as the Vikings struggled to find their pace early on. Eckert, the Philadelphia Catholic League’s MVP, admitted she was pretty frustrated in the first half but knew she could work with her coach to try different approaches.
“We didn’t play what Wood soccer is and Maria talked to us at half, told us to play how we usually play and that flowed in the second half,” Eckert said. “She’s a great coach, I love her and I’m going to miss having her be my coach but this was a great way to go out and she was a big part of that.”
As the ball started to move with a little more purpose, the energy in Wood’s possession picked up.
“We did a better job finding the players who needed the ball at their feet,” Kosmin said. “I think at the beginning, we were panicking a little bit and we had to get past that.”
Wood has eight seniors this year but beyond that, the Vikings had four sets of sisters on the roster so as Eckert noted it was the last time playing in the same uniform for a lot of the roster on Friday. That fueled the team’s play and it culminated with the Vikings finally getting a quality look and turning it into a top-notch finish.
After plenty of hard work by Brinley Miller, the ball found Johnston who sent it forward on the right flank to freshman Avery Miller. Avery Miller has a great cross in her arsenal and she sent one of them across the box where Eckert was able to slip in front of her defender and one-touch volley the ball off her right foot and in with 15 minutes to go.
“I saw her looking for me and saw the ball coming across,” Eckert said. “From there, it’s like an instinct to finish that ball.”
Wood tried its best to close out the match but when the Bucs were awarded a corner kick on a call the Vikings bench believed should have been a goal kick in their favor, they were tested again. Burrell’s Parker Moore punched home the tying goal off Eva Wilson’s service with 3:10 left but if it seemed like the WPIAL side had momentum off that going into overtime, a few seconds of Wood’s team talk would have dispelled that.
The Vikings were fired up, especially their leaders, and they made it known that while up to 40 more minutes were available, it wasn’t going to get that far.
“We were (angry) when we came off,” Eckert said. “We were like ‘there’s no way we’re letting this go, this is our game.’ We knew that and that’s why the goal came so early I think, we knew it was our game to win.”
Eckert did not have the best view of the winner, the senior having gone down to the turf as part of the effort to win the ball that Wiest would take in but she saw enough.
“I rolled over and saw her doing what she does with those cuts,” Eckert said.
Wiest picked up the ball on the left side about 45 yards out and covered most of that stretch in just a few touches until it was one defender and the keeper to beat. Once she crossed the threshold of the 18-yard box, that’s when the Chestnut Hill College recruit made her move, making a swift cut to her right and bending her shot around the keeper’s outstretched arm and into the bottom corner of the goal.
“I know our team is so good and our chemistry is so good, so this game just showed it,” Wiest said. “We were really pumped up. We knew we had to win this game.”
All season, Wiest and Eckert have formed a dynamic duo in terms of offensive production and it helped put them onto the all-state team as the PCL’s two selections. It seemed almost too fitting then that they’d each deliver one of the goals that sent Wood to its first state title.
“I think it showed why in this game,” Eckert said. “It’s a little ironic and funny it was the both of us but we kind of knew it might have to be like that.”
Friday was just Wood’s third ever appearance in the state final, the Vikings having lost their prior appearances in 2010 and 2012. Not only going back for the first time in 13 years but helping push the team over the top wasn’t something Kosmin was overlooking.
She took over the helm from her brother Tom DeGeorge and much of the extended DeGeorge/Kosmin clan were on hand at Northeastern for the moment. Tom’s daughters Alyssa and Ava helped establish this current era of Vikings soccer that’s been passed on to Maria and her daughter Mia, a standout freshman midfielder, with plenty of help from the players that overlapped between them these last four years.
“We talked about the difference between being afraid to lose and when losing’s not an option,” Kosmin said. “We went into this knowing we’d been through too much, had too many ups and downs, that losing wasn’t an option.
“It’s so special, a program is always the coaches before you and teams before you. I’ve been to a lot of these games, I’ve seen games that were close and they didn’t win, I’ve seen a lot of these kids be in quarterfinals or semifinals they didn’t win but I said from the start this team has the talent and I’m glad it was the team that was able to bring it home.”
Archbishop Wood 2, Burrell 1 (OT)
Archbishop Wood 0 1 1 – 2
Burrell 0 1 0 – 1
Goals; AW-Paige Eckert (Avery Miller), Kylie Wiest; B-Parker Moore.
