With a 2-1 win over top-seeded Canfield on Saturday, Harvey’s boys’ soccer team made a historic run to the OHSAA Division II regional tournament.
The Red Raiders rallied from a 1-0 deficit to beat the Cardinals in a Division II district championship game at Berkshire High School. The district title is the first in school history.
“It’s great,” said Harvey coach Natalie Sisler. “I don’t know if it’s historic, but it’s a good feeling all the way around for sure.”
Canfield, the No. 1 seed, broke a scoreless tie in the 64th minute thanks to an accurate Andrew Battaglia strike.
“There was a little bit of deflation,” Sisler said of her team’s response to the goal.
Six minutes later, the third-seeded Red Raiders evened the score thanks to Byron Perez, who scored his team-best 26th goal of the season. “You could see it, especially because I felt that for the majority of the game, we were playing really well and had a lot of shots compared to them. We were down a little bit but I think that kind of woke them back up and we knew we had to shift it into the next gear to be able to score a goal. Earlier in the season when we played Revere, a similar situation happened but we didn’t have the same mental toughness and fortitude to push out the win.”
The Red Raiders rode that momentum to the game-winning goal from Jason Cardenas off a set piece with just over four minutes left in regulation.
“That came off a corner,” Sisler said. “I think it touched one of our guys and kind of bounced around for a little bit in the box. Jason just came in and kind of slid it in from there right in front of the goal.”
After the goal, Sisler altered her lineup to solidify her defense and the Red Raiders rode out the clock.
“They killed the clock really well,” she said. “We’ve been working on that in games, taking the ball to the corner and killing off clock. I was just hoping we didn’t give one up at the end.”
Harvey advanced to play Bay in a regional semifinal on Wednesday at Streetsboro High School.
