Fort Payne girls see season come to end

Fort Payne High School girls soccer coach Phil Elton said his team didn’t make many defensive mistakes in its Class 5A, second round sub-state soccer match.

Unfortunately for the No. 8-ranked Lady Wildcats, when they did slip up, No. 6 Athens was ready.

The Lady Eagles scored the winning goal with about 11 minutes to play and edged the Lady Cats 2-1 on Tuesday night at Wildcat Stadium in game that had been postponed twice due to heavy rain that moved through the area Saturday-Monday.

Athens (15-7-3) advanced to face No. 2 Briarwood Christian (14-5-2) in a state semifinal Friday at Huntsville. No. 4 St. Paul’s (16-4-2) and Moody (14-2-1) will meet in the other semifinal. Both are set for 1:30 p.m.

The loss left Fort Payne (16-7-1) one victory short of a Final Four berth after the Lady Cats won a series of close matches down the stretch to put themselves on the verge of a bus ride to the Rocket City.

“I could not have asked for anything more from the girls,” Fort Payne coach Phil Elton said. “We gave it everything we had. We had two defensive mistakes and Athens capitalized on both of them.”

Fort Payne won three matches by one goal during the penultimate week of the regular season, including two that went to shootouts, to claim the Area 7 championship, then downed Hartselle 2-1 in the first round of sub-state.

This time, however, Fort Payne was on the wrong end of a one-goal squeaker.

“You have to give credit to the opponent,” Elton said. “They capitalized on our one mistake in the second half.

“We just couldn’t get the ball in the net.. The momentum was in our favor for long periods in the second half. You need to capitalize on those times, and we just couldn’t find a way to score.”

Fort Payne outshot Athens 9-8. After the Lady Eagles took a 1-0 lead into halftime, the Lady Cats tied it at 1-all when Madi Clark scored unassisted in the 17th minute of the second half.

Rachel Lester finished with two saves for Fort Payne.

While disappointed by the setback, Elton praised his team for its accomplishments.

“We overcame a lot of adversity this year,” he said. “We had four concussions. We had our leading scorer move to another school. We had key players injured.

“On balance, we fought to the bitter end.”