Girls heading to the final four
After sharing the Section V Class AA girls soccer championship with Spencerport and advancing to the state tournament on penalty kicks, Churchville-Chili knocked off Clarence of Section VI in the regional round and Frontier 2-0 in the quarterfinals to advance to the state final four for the first time since 2003.
Senior and second-leading scorer Jillyan Ewing converted a pass from junior Ava Fedele in the first half. Then, freshman and leading scorer Elise Faix scored on a second-half penalty kick after senior Alexis Olson was taken down by the Frontier goalkeeper in the box.
“I felt really honored to take it (the penalty kick); I had a lot of confidence…and scoring it was a great moment,” Faix said. “We kept the intensity up the entire game; in some moments it did get kind of scary, but we kept it going.”
Senior goalkeeper Tessa Wood registered her tenth shutout of the season and fourth of the postseason.
“As a team, we defended really well the entire game,” Wood said. “We work really hard on defending not only coming from our defense but coming from our offense too…and I think we did a really good job with that.”
The Saints finished the regular season with a 12-3 record and are now riding an eight-game winning streak, with seven of them shutouts, including the postseason.
Churchville-Chili began the regular season with four wins but suffered consecutive losses to rival Spencerport and Penfield in mid-September, which may have helped the team in the long run.
“Kind of a reset for us; we figured out what we needed to work on, worked on that, and I think we’ve improved a lot since then,” Wood said about the three losses.
“Looking at the season schedule before we started, we knew that was going to be a tough week because obviously one of those losses was to Spencerport, which is always going to be a tough game…so I don’t know if it was necessarily a wake-up call, but it was fuel for the fire,” head coach Brooke Elnicky said.
The Saints have received contributions offensively from several sources. Besides the aforementioned Faix, Ewing, and Fedele, Olson has seven goals with nine assists, senior Avery Alai has five goals, senior Shavonne Callahan added three goals with two assists, and junior Hailey Hotaling chipped in a pair of goals with two assists.
“We have a lot of seniors—I think 12—so everyone is a leader,” Ewing said.
“Our back line (seniors Avery Aloi and Kayla Cervini; juniors Gianna Denning and Hotaling) and our goalkeeper have been amazing, but all season long we’ve been focusing on team defense, and I think we’re finally getting to the point where we’re really starting to see that come to fruition in our games,” Elnicky said.
The Saints take on Section IX’s Warwick in the state semi-final on November 15 for the right to face the winner of Albertus Magnus (Section I) vs. West Islip (Section XI) in the state championship game.
Boys making first trip to semifinals
