They didn’t win the state tournament this year, but they did go out on top.
The Juneau-Douglas High School boys soccer team notched their final victory of the season Saturday with a 3-0 consolation bracket win over Dimond High School. The win earned the Crimson Bears fourth place in the Alaska School Activities Association Soccer State Tournament in Anchorage this weekend.
According to coach Gary Lehnhart, the team hasn’t lost twice in the state tournament for something like 17 years. Though disappointed with their first-round knockout, it was important to the team to keep that streak going.
“When you lose in the opening round, especially in a game that you dominated and couldn’t score, psychologically we were pretty vulnerable, but the kids bounced back,” Lehnhart said.
JDHS found themselves facing Dimond after a 1-0 opening round loss to Kenai and a 4-1 consolation bracket win over Homer.
Dimond had defeated the Crimson Bears 4-2 in the regular season, but JDHS dominated the whole way in their final 2017 game.
JDHS’ first goal came 10 minutes in off an Ezra Geselle header. Geselle had to sit out the previous game.
In the 45th minute, a Canon Getz cross to the near post found Ben Unduragga to make the game 2-0.
About 10 minutes later, a Ben Carter-Bryson Mitchell connection resulted in a third goal.
A converted field player, Lehnhart said junior Ben Campbell stepped up to play goalie for the first time in the state tournament for the JDHS squad, who fielded several different players in front of the net during the year.
The team felt they should have been playing for more in their final game, but they weren’t going to roll over.
“That’s one of the things we take pride in this program, is when we haven’t been playing in the final, that if we’ve been knocked out earlier, we’ve never been eliminated, we’ve won out,” Lehnhart said. “We know that we were not outplayed in any of our three games and I think we felt good about that.”
