St. John the Baptist Girls Soccer Lose to St. Anthony's 4-0 in Semis

A year after defeating St. Anthony's for the CHSAA AA Title, the St. John the Baptist girls varsity soccer team returned to face the Friars in an AA semifinals playoff matchup.

But the Cougars couldn't repeat their 2009 performance and fell 4-0 to the undefeated Friars Monday night.  It was their second loss to St. Anthony's in 12 days. 

It was still a 1-0 game with just under nine minutes remaining in the second half when Friars' Margo McGinty beat Cougars' keeper Jackie Ubert to her left to increase the lead to two. Things fell apart for the Cougars after that as junior forward Reanna Marino added her second goal with less than five minutes to go and Liz Agiato scored with 1:46 left to seal the 4-0 victory.

"We're a young team so hopefully we're building on this," head coach Shannon Keenan said. "We won it last year and were expecting to do a little bit better today. We had some injuries, all we had were 11 or 12 players that really step up and can play at this level… we lost some kids today and were getting beat up. We didn't play well, we didn't show up to play and we deserved to lose."

The Friars broke a scoreless game at the 7:05 mark in the first half.  Marino got the ball at the top of the box, shot it off the right post and past Ubert to take a 1-0 lead.  St. Anthony's advances to take on Kellenberg in the finals this Friday at Adelphi. 

The Cougars ended the season as the No. 4 seed after losing their last two regular season games to finish 8-3-1 in league play. They beat St. Francis Prep 1-0 in the quarterfinals Friday to set the matchup with the Friars for Monday night. With five freshmen and two sophomores as starters, Keenan was pleased with how the season went but disappointed with the team's effort Monday.

"The season actually went better than I thought it was going to," she said. "We just lost two games at the end of the year where we should've won one and ended up [with a higher seed]. Overall it was a decent season since I considered this as a rebuilding year so it was okay…I'm just not happy with the performance today."

Even with all the fresh faces on the team, the Cougars will graduate nine seniors after this year, so Keenan will look forward to building a core for the future in 2011.

"Next year's probably going to be similar to this year," she said. "We're losing some key seniors but still rebuilding. I'm looking on the year after that being stronger, hopefully if I can pull in a good class of freshman coming in next year I think we'll be OK."