HAMPDEN — Any great production, from Oscar-winning movies to successful soccer sides, needs a strong supporting cast.
No. 3 Winslow got a pair of goals from its depth performers Monday afternoon, key goals to break open a 3-0 win over No. 2 Hermon in a Class B North girls soccer semifinal played in a driving rain from start to finish at Hampden Academy. The Black Raiders (16-1-0) advance to meet No. 1 Presque Isle, the reigning Class B North champion, on the road in Wednesday night’s regional final.
Hermon (13-2-1) failed to move beyond the semifinals for the first time since 2010.
Seniors Desiree Veilleux and Hailey Grenier each scored in the second half as Winslow earned a spot in a regional championship game for the first time under head coach Steve Bodge.
“We’ve got 13 or 14 different kids (who) have scored for this team,” Bodge said. “It comes from being deep, and it comes from everybody trusting everybody else. And probably some of it comes from other teams focusing on (Sara Doughty, Katie Doughty and Carly Warn) and everybody else getting opportunities. We had three different kids score goals today, and I’m proud of all three of them.”
Sara Doughty also scored for Winslow, which has won 12 straight.
“A little bit,” Veilleux said of whether she feels she and others can be overlooked. “They’re the ones we look to because they can shoot. The rest of us can shoot, too, obviously.”
Sara Doughty opened the scoring in the 35th minute following a couple of narrow misses for the Black Raiders around the 30-minute mark, whipping Warn’s cross off the right wing inside the far post from 15 yards out.
But it was Veilleux’s strike in the 42nd minute, less than 120 seconds after the intermission, which handed a game Winslow had carried from the outset to the visitors. Katie Doughty’s corner kick from the right corner found an unmarked Veilleux standing inside the six-yard box, and Veilleux didn’t have to so much as leap to head the ball home for a 2-0 lead.
“I was expecting someone to come up from behind me,” Veilleux said. “I saw it floating in, and I knew it was mine.”
“The near-post player is supposed to defend that, and she ducked with the girl right behind her,” Hermon coach M.J. Ball said. “We work on that so many times in practice, and if anything you’ve got to win that ball and get it out, especially in the first two minutes of the half. That was a back-breaker, and it definitely sunk spirits.”
The two-goal advantage might as well have been six, if reading the Hawks’ collective body language was any indication.
“We did not play our style. We are a skill-based team, and for some reason we were in panic mode,” Ball said. “We were under a lot of pressure, and our way of dealing with it today was just hitting it and losing it. It was not a good performance on our end.”
Grenier capped a commanding afternoon for the Black Raiders with her goal in the 52nd minute.
The first shot took a deflection in front of Hermon goalkeeper Megan Chamberlain (nine saves) and skittered straight to Grenier for an easy tap-in tally.
The final goal also did much to illustrate the discrepancy between the two sides. Winslow outshot Hermon by a 21-6 count (12-3 in on-target chances), produced three corner kicks to none and simply kept the Hawks locked into their end of the pitch.
“We knew the key was going to be to stop the ball in the mid, so they couldn’t hit it through to the strikers,” Sara Doughty said. “Their strikers are really skilled. We knew we have a fast midfield, so we just had to shut the ball down quick. We just worked together.”
“It was pretty clear they wanted to use their middle midfielders to get the ball over the top,” Bodge said. “In the second half of the first half, we committed to stopping what they were doing well and doing what we do well, which is getting the ball to the edge of the field and committing to the front post.
“We ended up getting three, so I’m very happy with that situation.”
Travis Barrett — 621-5621
tbarrett@centralmaine.com
Twitter: @TBarrettGWC
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