No. 22 Riders upsets No. 8 Anna.
ANNA — Maybe now they’ll take notice.
That was the first statement Roughriders coach Nick Wilson made to his team a day after St. Marys was still ranked behind Bath in Friday’s Northwest Ohio Soccer Scholastic Coaches Association Poll, despite beating the Wildcats the night before.
So the Riders came into Saturday motivated and the Rockets got their wrath.
“These girls are hungry and they feel a little slighted when the rankings came out yesterday [Friday] in the district and the team that we beat Thursday night was still ahead of us,” Wilson said. “I was surprised [but] it was a tremendous motivation for me.
“The girls felt disrespected and they should have.”
Lilly Ankerman scored the game’s lone goal at the end of the first half and the team prevailed despite playing a player down because of Ankerman’s red card in the final 27:02 to pitch the team’s seventh shutout for a 1-0 win against No. 8-ranked Anna on Saturday.
Better start taking notice of the Roughriders now.
“This team averaged six goals a game and they were 12-0 and we shut them down,” Wilson said. “This is a solid program and you come in on their turf and shut them down — I will put up our defense against any defense out there. It was a new concept and it showed in the early games against some crazy tough talent but they’ve got it figured it out.
“I couldn’t be more proud. I don’t like giving team balls but that was a team game.”
St. Marys (9-3-1) won its eighth consecutive game on Saturday and defeated its second state-ranked opponent in as many games between teams with a combined 22-3 record.
Coming off their stunning upset of No. 6-ranked Bath from Thursday, the Roughriders started slowly against the Rockets by allowing a couple of corner kicks and committed a foul deep on their end, but the defense and goalkeeper Kiley Tennant still blocked Anna from getting on the board.
Then the Riders struck on offense.
Anna pitched seven shutouts and allowed just six goals coming into Saturday but Ankerman made sure her team wouldn’t become the eighth opponent to be blanked by the Rockets.
Aerial Fast was able to finally break through, passing the ball to Ankerman, who was making a break up the field, beating Anna’s Taylor Poeppelman and faced the keeper Beiwllw Collier one on one as she won the battle with a shot past her to the left side of the goal with 2:59 remaining.
Looking to attack nearly 13 minutes into the second half, Ankerman was looking for a carbon copy of her goal from the first half when she was pushed from behind and went tumbling while the ball fell into Coller’s hands. Ankerman was then hit with a red card by the official when she got up and had some choice words. The red card results in Ankerman being suspended for the next pair of games — against Celina on Tuesday and Fort Jennings next Monday. She will return against Defiance Oct. 13 for the regularseason finale.
At stake on Tuesday, however, is the Western Buckeye League title as the Roughriders travel to Celina to play the Bulldogs in their quest for a second WBL crown in three seasons.
In last season’s matchup against Celina, the Riders forced a 1-1 and that result made the difference as Shawnee won the league with 23 points to Celina’s 21 points.
With his top scorer out, Wilson will spend the next few days figuring out how to make sure his team does not endure the same fate they handed the Bulldogs last year.
“We have to talk,” he added. “No one has Lil’s speed and that’s part of why our system works with that lone striker at the top. Some are close but at this level, close isn’t enough sometimes. So we’ll have to talk about how we are going to adjust but we adjusted on the fly today.
“Beating two stateranked teams back to back is great, but I don’t care, I don’t care. We’ve got to come out of Tuesday with a win. There is no getting around it.”
Also at stake on Tuesday is seeding in the Division II district tournament. A win or possibly a tie would hand the Roughriders the No. 1 seed as the team looks to make a long-awaited postseason run.
“Work is far from being down and Tuesday night is everything,” Wilson added.