Clippers upbeat after Rams win on 78th-minute corner kick
Cumberland still in state title race headed into final third of season
CUMBERLAND — Abby Free was just a precocious freshman the last time the Cumberland girls soccer team defeated perennial state title contender La Salle.
Since that wild game at Tucker Field in 2016, the Rams have been to three straight state finals, while the Clippers were forced to rebuild following the graduation of the heroes that October night, Julianne Ross and Abby Drezek.
Friday, the teams met again at Tucker and the situation felt eerily similar to 2016 with the Clippers sitting in front of the Rams in the Division I standings, but still not sure if they were true title contenders.
Even though La Salle escaped with a 1-0 victory thanks to a 78th-minute goal from senior forward Kaiya Boyd, the Clippers feel emboldened headed into the final third of the season.
“I feel good about this game because it showed certain girls’ strengths who weren’t on the field
before and girls who weren’t on the field at the beginning of the season really proved themselves today,” Free said after a superb performance in the middle of the defense. “We just need to keep working on our passing and we need to get better in the final quarter of the field because we do a good job of getting close.”
“We played well, so it’s heartbreaking to lose with two minutes left on a corner kick,” Cumberland coach Jon Hoxsie said. “I just told those girls that they worked their butts off. We worked hard, we played well and we got an unlucky bounce and they caught a break. We left a really good player unmarked, but otherwise I was really happy with how we played.”
Cumberland (8-2-0 Division I) still has to play undefeated North Kingstown, but the Clippers just finished their most difficult stretch of the season 3-2 with a pair of 1-0 home losses to Coventry and La Salle. The key for the Clippers if they want to earn a first-round bye and a home game in the state quarterfinals is to take care of business in games where they are favored to earn three points.
One of those games is Tuesday night’s trip across the Blackstone River to Ferguson Field to take on a Lincoln squad that is coming off a 7-2 defeat to Coventry Friday afternoon.
“This was a tough second third of the season for us, but we played well,” Hoxsie said. “We went 3-2 and we’ve still allowed just four goals in 10 games, that’s something we wouldn’t ever thought of doing last year. Lincoln is struggling, but in rivalry games that doesn’t matter. In a rivalry game, it’s 0-0 until someone does something about it.”
La Salle (8-0-2 Division I) jumped ahead of the Clippers for second place in the division and haven’t allowed a goal in its last five games after allowing Smithfield to score twice in a 2-2 tie. As they usually do, the Rams controlled the tempo of the game with their slick passing, but the more direct Clippers actually created the better scoring chances until Boyd delivered her team-leading ninth goal of the season.
Cumberland, which was playing into a stiff breeze in the first half, nearly took the lead in the 16th minute when a Ram defender and goalie Krista Varrichione (three saves) contrived to misplay a ball right into the path of Riley Trudeau. The forward clipped the ball toward the empty net, but an kicked it off the goal line.
Juliette Vemmer, who made nine saves, wasn’t forced to make any difficult saves in the opening half to keep the game scoreless. In the second half, Clippers’ Campbell Gothberg and Halle Delmore both had good scoring chances, but the game was tied in the 78th minute when Catherine Clements stepped up to take a corner kick.
Clements played a curling ball to the near post where an unmarked Boyd side footed a shot into the net to win the game.
“We just played La Salle 0-0 for 78 minutes and we looked good doing it,” Hoxsie said. “It’s a tough defeat, but hopefully when we reflect on it, it’s a confidence builder.”
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