Lutheran North advances to district championship game
By Jim Evans
Let’s figure out some sure fire attention getters:
A geyser of Nestle’s Quik coming out of a nearby fire hydrant.
Spiderman, Thor and Iron Man moving into the house across the street.
Haley’s Comet hurtling so close to earth that you could feel its hot breath on the back of your neck.
A quick goal by the Richmond Blue Devils in a Division 3 district semifinal game at Lutheran North against the top-seeded Mustangs.
Yep, all of the above are attention-grabbers.
When Richmond’s Drew Matyunas scored less than five minutes into Monday evening’s game, it gave the Blue Devils a 1-0 advantage.
A couple of minutes later, Lutheran North’s Sam Caldwell evened the score and that is the way it stood until the host Mustangs put up three unanswered goals in the second half to leave with a 4-1 victory.
They will play Imlay City, which defeated Armada, 6-0 in the second game of the night at Lutheran North Monday. The district championship will be decided at 5 p.m., Wednesday, at Lutheran North.
“Paper does not win games. You can’t take any team for granted. I knew that Richmond would come out and fight and have a good game plan and that is definitely what they did. It took Richmond about 10 seconds to score and it took us about half an hour,” said Brian Horvath, the Lutheran North coach.
“Did they take us by surprise? I don’t think so; I told the players that this could be their last game and they had to play it that way,” continued Horvath.
The early goal definitely got the attention of the home team. That said, it still was not easy to score on the defensive-minded set of the visitors from Richmond.
“You have to move the ball around to the outside and send it back in,” said Horvath. “I think we were trying to be too pretty perhaps with our possessions. At halftime, we adjusted defensively to stop the one guy from Richmond who was really dangerous on top. You learn pretty quickly when you get scored on that quickly.”
It was the Mustangs’ Nate Maceroni who scored the tie-breaker with 17:31 left to play in the game. Gavin Kraatz netted the final two goals for Lutheran North.
Coach Lance Whitney’s Blue Devils bow out with an impressive 12-3-1 record. They finished second in the BWAC behind Imlay City.
“Getting ready for this game, as a coach you put it to the kids as straight as you can. Lutheran North is a great team and probably more talented, but you can make up for that with grit, hard work and determination,” said Whitney. “With everybody buying into a game plan and us getting a goal early, it looked pretty good. It just came down to a couple of mistakes. Without those mistakes, who knows?”
The Richmond coaches and players gathered at the far corner of the field after the game to talk.
“I tell the underclassmen to remember how this feels. Take a little time off and then get a group together to play indoor and get some extra training,” said Whitney. “I tell the seniors that I hope I gave them everything that they could have wished for from the sport. Hopefully, they leave with just positive memories that they can talk to their own kids and grandkids about someday.”
That is the reality of the state tournament. One team’s season ends and the other team’s season continues.
Lutheran North, which advanced all the way to the state semifinals in 2018, has at least one more game on its docket.
After Wednesday, though, nothing is guaranteed.
Article originally posted by The Macomb Daily