Haddon Township keeps the faith and rides it to Coaches Tournament championship
CHERRY HILL – The last element was belief, and it took a while to come.
“Nobody thought we could be here,” Haddon Township senior midfielder Luke Chatten said. “We didn't even think we could be here, to be honest, but with a lot of heart and passion, we got here.”
The Hawks won a shootout from Shawnee Saturday night after the teams battled to a 1-1 draw in regulation. Cole Johnston made one save and the Renegades put one wide as the Hawks converted all four of their chances and captured the South Jersey Coaches Association Tournament.
For Johnston, it was the third huge save of the night. The first came early in the second half, when a long diagonal overhead from Sean McFadden sent Matt Conger in one-on-one with a defender. Conger cut the ball back to his right, and as he moved from Johnston's right to left, sent a rolling shot back across, toward the post.
Somehow, Johnston stretched out and got a foot on it.
“I didn't think I could react in time to get my hands down there, so I just wanted to get a foot there and at least get some contact on it, and at least deflect it,” Johnston said. “And it got caught under my foot, so I was able to grab it right after that.”
An offside call took away an apparent Shawnee goal in the 48th minute and it stayed 1-1 until the last minute of extra time, when a long, speculative shot from Matt Quinn, fully 40 yards away, seemed to trouble Johnston, who leaped at the last instant to punch it away.
“It was knuckling and swerving a little bit,” he said. “And I just wanted to make sure I got good contact and pushed it out of bounds, and then time ran out, so I got lucky with that.”
Johnston actually put a goal in himself in the shootout, just a moment before his last save of the night.
“I practice them a lot, usually in between drills in practice,” Johnston said. “I think knowing how to take one helps in terms of trying to save them.”
With that moment negotiated, he dived to his right to palm out Quinn's attempt and give Haddon Township the lead.
“I usually look at a person's knees, to see which way they'll go,” Johnston said. “But that was more of a guess. And I was able to guess right.”
The Hawks went ahead in the 13th minute of regulation, when Finn McGovern's long throw-in found a Shawnee head in the scrum at the front of the net and caromed in. It stayed 1-0 until Conger got on the end of a cross from Quinn and hit a low right-footed shot back across the front of Johnston.
The Renegades were carrying the play by the end of the first half and Haddon Township coach Jim Bonder was appealing to his players to keep the pressure on. Don't weather the storm – be the storm.
“That's sort of been our philosophy,” Bonder said. “Tempo is the key to our success. We want to play fast and pressure, and we don't want to lose energy, ever. Part of my job is to help them keep their energy up, and I know even with three minutes left in the half, when I know they're exhausted, to try to push them to find that next gear.”
Belief, he let them find on their own.
“I think we knew it was such a tall ask, but every game, they've stepped up,” Bonder said. “We made this run without one of our top scorers. Graham (Looram) has been sidelined for a few weeks now. It was an enormously tall task, and I think we knew we were going to have to play this type of game to win.”
What it means
Haddon Township became just the fourth Group 1 school to win the Coaches Tournament and the second to win it outright. Schalick was a co-champ with Holy Cross in 1994 and Haddonfield shared the crown with Cinnaminson in 1979. Riverside was the other outright champion, in 1981.
By the numbers
Shawnee, which has won the tournament 12 times, has now gone 16 years without taking the trophy home. The Renegades were the only team to win both the boys and girls crowns in the same year, in 2003, and had a chance to duplicate that feat when Saturday night started, but the girls fell to Eastern, 1-0. It was the sixth crown in 11 years for the Eastern girls. All six of the years in which they won have yielded a different boys' champion.
They said it
Shawnee coach Ryan Franks:
Credit to Haddon Township; they absolutely battled. We just had so many chances that we just didn't convert, and a goal that was called back that I'd love to see on film. I don't think many people picked us to be here at the beginning of the year. We learned a lot about ourselves during this tournament and about how resilient we can be. We're going to take these lessons we've learned from this whole tournament and use them when we start states this week.”
Chatten, on his team's mood after Shawnee's tying goal:
“The mood is, yeah it sucks, but you've just got to keep the momentum. This game is all based on momentum and fighting that adversity. I thought we did well, just bouncing back, even though at times we were being dominated. We just kept going.”
What's next
Shawnee's opponent in the 2006 Coaches Tournament final was Bishop Eustace, which coincidentally, is also the team that the Renegades will host on Monday.
It feels like the end of the world, to get to a tournament final and then lose in a shootout, but Franks' message after the game had to be “we're back to work, day after tomorrow.”
“I think it is hard, especially after all these guys put into it,” Franks said. “Especially to see it decided in PKs is hard, but I think the one thing that's reassuring is that these guys are like brothers to each other, and they'll be there to pick each other up. They're there to celebrate when it's good, like the other night, and they're there to pick each other up when it's bad. That's part of being a good teammate and part of being part of the Shawnee boys soccer program.”
John A. Lewis is a sports writer for the Burlington County Times, the Courier Post and the Vineland Daily Journal. E-mail him at jlewis@thebct.com. Please consider supporting local journalism with a subscription.
This article originally appeared on Burlington County Times: Johnston saves Haddon Township's bid for Coaches crown
