STATE GIRLS SOCCER: Cloquet grinds to the bitter end
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Dan Saletel
Cloquet-Carlton #5 Jaxie Pogorelc helps clear the ball from in front of the Lumberjack's net during Thursday night's matchup against Holy Angels Academy in Chisago Lakes. Dan Saletel/Pine Knot Sports
Dwight Cadwell
Pine Knot Sports
LINDSTROM-The Academy of Holy Angels built a three-goal first-half lead and survived to defeat Cloquet-Carlton 4-3 in a Class 1A quarterfinal Thursday at Chisago Lakes High School.
The Stars' Sydney Burns, Claire Lang, Hailey VonSee and Mia Van der Heide all scored in the first half, to give the Stars a 4-1 halftime lead. Burns scored in the game's second minute on a crossing pass from Ciara McCrory to give the Stars a 1-0 lead.
Lang scored the second goal of the game at the 23-minute mark to make it 2-0 Holy Angels. VonSee made it 3-0 two minutes later in what seemed to be a runaway for the Stars.
"We were playing kind of back on our heels there in the early going," Lumberjacks head coach Derek Randall said, "They have a lot of team speed and bottled us up when we tried to push the ball."
The No. 2-ranked Stars were a fast and disciplined team, but Cloquet didn't give up ... and neither did their fans, who came bearing cheer heads and wearing homemade horns.
Freshman Alexa Snesrud gave Cloquet-Carlton some hope in the first half when she cut the Stars' lead at the 29-minute mark to make it 3-1. However, any momentum with the Lumberjack goal was short-lived when the Stars' top scorer, Van der Heide, made a 44-yard free kick at the 31st minute mark which sailed right over the outstretched fingertips of Lumberjack goalie Gracie Meagher, and the Stars were back in front by three. They maintained that lead at the break.
The second half started slowly as the Angels went into a defensive mode and pulled everyone back on every rush the Lumberjacks had and slowly dumped the ball back into the 'Jacks' zone and there wasn't much flow.
Dan Saletel
Cloquet-Carlton #16 Hannah Biebl winds up for a kick that scores the Lumberjack's second goal during Thursday evening's matchup against Holy Angels Academy in Chisago Lakes.
The flow came back - as did the excitement and momentum when Hannah Biebel scored at the 18:51 mark of the second half to bring hope back to the Lumberjacks.
With the goal by Biebel, life seemed to come back into the bench and the team as the Lumberjacks pushed the Stars to the brink by carrying play to Holy Angels again and again. Eventually, the Jacks were rewarded when Snesrud scored her second goal of the game with a short chip short over Stars goalie Rachel Kawiecki with seven minutes left to play.
"We kind of finally relaxed some and played the way we know how to play," Randall said. "We played our hearts out and gave them everything we could down the stretch, but the lead they built up was hard to overcome."
The Lumberjacks finished the season with an overall record of 16-3.
