NMMI, St. Mike’s go OT for victories
Metro area excluded from first small school final since 1991
SANTA ANA PUEBLO — Adiós, Albuquerque.
For the Class 1A-3A boys in the state soccer tournament, the Duke City will be taking a rare back seat on this championship Friday.
There has been a metro-based team in the final of the smallest soccer classification every season since Aztec and Bloomfield squared off in 1991.
But when New Mexico Military Institute survived an eight-kicker overtime shootout to oust Sandia Prep, it eliminated the last local squad from the tournament while sending the Colts to their first championship game.
On the other end of the bracket, St. Michael’s won an overtime slugfest of Santa Fe-based teams to advance to the final for the first time since 2004.
No. 2 NEW MEXICO MILITARY INSTITUTE 0, No. 3 SANDIA PREP 0 (NMMI
won 7-6 in penalty kicks): When Colts goalkeeper Allen Varela knocked away Blue Kozikowski’s attempt as the eighth Sundevils shooter, it secured the win for NMMI (19-1-1).
But when it comes right down to it, Varela really saved the game in the 58th minute.
Prep midfielder Dane Gallegos launched a run down the near wing, fed D. J. Roberts, then received a pinpoint 1-2 touch back as he cut toward the goal. Varela attacked Gallegos and read the play precisely.
“I come out a lot,” Varela said. “He didn’t poke it. And when he didn’t poke it, I saw there was nobody beside him so I knew he was going to try and beat me. I saw his leg open to push it to the side. I just spread my arms and tucked it in. If he was going to shoot, he needed to chip me or poke it, but he just took too long.”
That was the turning point of the game, said Sandia Prep coach Tommy Smith.
“That was the game-saver right there,” he said.
It’s the type of play Varela is counted on to make, NMMI coach John Barbour said.
“He’s got great hands and he’s really good ‘one-v-one,’ but we don’t want him to be in that situation if we can avoid it. For obvious reasons,” he said. “But when called upon, he makes tremendous stops, and he’s not afraid to come out and take the ball off somebody.”
It was the only real scoring threat of the game from either side during the run of play, but Smith said the Colts defense was a difficult matchup for Sandia Prep (15-6-1).
“I think defensively they were very, very good,” he said of NMMI. “That was most of it, I think. The fact that we just couldn’t click offensively. We had a couple of times that we broke through but to their credit there was a guy back there. You get by one and there was another guy there. They clear everything clean out of the air. They didn’t make any mistakes. Usually when you get balls flighted in, you get a mistake to happen. They did a great job defensively.”
No. 8 ST. MICHAEL’S 3, No. 4 MONTE DEL SOL 2 (2 OTs): Wesley Graham already had an aching hip and had already missed a penalty kick for the Horsemen (12-9-2).
But when it counted, the senior leader came through with the game-winner.
“He was really feeling it,” St. Michael’s coach Mike Feldewert said of Graham. “I don’t know how he’ll be (today), but he puts it in in the end for us. I almost took him out.”
Graham knew he had to shake off the pain to get it down for his team, especially after the Dragons (17-4-0) tied it on a Pedro Chavez goal in the final minute of regulation.
“We knew that if we kept getting set pieces and corners, we could get the goal and we made that happen,” he said.
All three of the Horsemen’s scores came after corner kicks, with the gamewinner starting on Oliver Rosales’ corner that Berkeley Reynolds won with a header that caromed off another player to Graham, who put it away.
“It was amazing,” Graham said. Indeed it was, Feldewert said. “The biggest thing was it’s hard to control a game like that and be up the entire game and have a tie goal in the last minute. And for them to be able to recover mentally from that to come out with that kind of effort and to put it behind them, it was neat to see,” he said.