By Michael Wojtychiw
New players, new season, same result.
As players graduate, new ones replace them, but one thing stays the same in Chicago Public League girls soccer: Lane Tech wins another city championship.
Players like Scout Murray, Dale Sink, Maya Martinez-Bates, Jocelyn Ramirez, Lisa Rios, Zehra Halilic, Alana Coffman and more all players who have helped the Champions win city titles in the past five years or more, have graduated.
But yet Lane keeps winning city titles.
The Champions were hoping to continue that streak when they faced off with Jones last Wednesday on a beautiful night at Lane Stadium in front of a crowd of 600.
And like the previous seven seasons, the Champions came out on top, defeating the Eagles 6-0 in Jones’ second trip to the city championship game in school history.
“We definitely feel the pressure every year,” Lane’s Avery Ellis said. “It’s a big reputation to keep and every year it’s more and more pressure because you don’t want to be the ones who lose the streak. But it also pushes us and that pressure is good for us and allows us to keep winning.
“Our nonconference games really set us up to know how to respond to any adversity. That was something we struggled with early, but as we’ve progressed, we started responding really well.”
“It’s an awesome feeling, a little surreal,” Lane manager Robert Harkness said about winning the title in his first year as head coach. “Doing it the last couple years has been great, but doing it as a head coach is a totally different feeling.”
The Eagles actually started the game well, being able to play through the midfield and going into the Champions’ defensive zone, but weren’t able to capitalize.
In the meantime, Lane was working on getting their own offense going, finally being able to capitalize when Jackson Caffey took a ball from Grace Carman and slotted it past Jones keeper Ruby MIller, giving the Champions an early 1-0 lead halfway through the first half.
Carman, who has had a breakout sophomore campaign, played a big role for Lane throughout the entire match. She assisted on the Champions’ second goal, dishing out a pass to Ellis in the 36th minute.
Just two minutes later, the two connected again, but this time Ellis feeding Carman for a goal, helping the Champions go into halftime with a 3-0 lead.
“The energy really pushes me and my whole family was here, including my sister who just got back from college,” said Ellis when talking about her goal. “I wanted to make them proud and it felt great being able to perform for them.”
Lane put the hame away quickly in the second half, with Carman scoring her second goal off of a Kristi Sevova assist less than four minutes into the half and Ellis scoring her second nearly an exact minute after.
Sevova scored her second of the goal with just under 28 minutes left to round out the scoring.
“We were pretty battle-tested from early in the season,” the Lane manager said. “Our young players, while super talented, needed some time to gel into the team and I think that really hard competition helps us prep for that.”
After a slow start to the year that included some tough games against highly-regarded teams like Loyola, Glenbrook North, Stevenson, New Trier and Lake Forest, Harkness had a feeling his squad had a chance to make it back to the title game.
“Going into the season we set goals for ourselves, but I think it was during the Lou Malnati’s tournament,” Harkness said. “Some of the perseverance that they demonstrated. Early in the season, we were struggling to score goals. But the result against New Trier, even though we gave up a lead, really felt like something. We felt we could compete with anybody, it felt really excellent.
“But also the stretch run after we came back from Spring Break. We played Payton and Jones back-to-back and I think we had something really special.”
Lane now faces Maine West tonight in the regional semifinal at home. A win gets them a date with St. Ignatius, which defeated Lane 1-0 in the team’s second game of the year.
