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Sports

Herndon Boys Soccer's Season Ends With Loss to West Springfield

Hornets fall 1-0 in rain-delayed Northern Regional quarterfinal.

After a 90-minute rain delay, Herndon High's oustanding boys soccer season came to an end in its Northern Regional quarterfinal match.

West Springfield (14-1-3) defeated the Hornets (14-2-1), 1-0.  

Herndon was trailing 1-0 when play was stopped due to weather with more than 24 minutes left in the first half. West Springfield had scored on a 25-yard goal from Wais Ansary two minutes earlier.

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 “As soon as I got the ball in space, I knew to hit it,” Ansary said, “If you have a touch like that you might as well hit it.

 Things started out rough for Herndon but became even worse after the restart. At least two Hornets received yellow cards and the keeper was given a red card when he touched the ball with his hands outside of the 18-yard-box during a miscommunication with one of his defensive men.

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Sophomore Kurt Meyers stepped into goal for the Hornets, who were forced to play a man down in the field for the majority of the match due to the infraction.

“We talked about being a man down and playing until the last second,” Herndon Coach Sean Lanigan said. “They outnumbered us at midfield and they had fresher legs. We didn’t do a decent job of dealing with the five in the back and just trying to lump balls into a five vs. two situation—you’re not going to be very successful doing that.”

West Springfield picked its game up where it left off during the storm to control possession and speed of the competition. Patric Burns, Ansary and Jannik Eckenrode built a virtual wall at midfield to stop the Hornets from successfully lobbing air balls to Patrick McLaughlin and EK Korvah who stayed on the attack but came just short of scoring on four or five occasions.

 The Spartan strategy worked as planned and Coach Andy Saffron said although it is tough to play a team you do not know well, his team managed to figure out how to expose the Hornets' weakness.

“After that first 15 minutes when we scored, the objective was to keep dictating the tempo from the center-mids,”  Saffron said. “I think what’s unique about our team is that we had given up goals this season but our kids bounce right back, have a lot of fight in them and they just go out and compete.”

 Herndon's record-setting season - the Hornets were undefeated in regular-season play - comes to an end and the high school career of seniors  Sam Eaddy and Raleigh McKenzie are over. But the majority of the team will return next year, and Lanigan believes it will be something very special.

“We have a very strong junior class and five or six very good sophomores coming through the system,” Lanigan said. “Next year’s team will be, I think, stronger than this year’s team and another regional contender.”

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