In the 99th minute — the ninth minute of the second overtime period — Emily Jordan beat a defender and fired the ball off the fingertips of Neosho’s keeper, then off the post, then into the goal for a sudden-death, 2-1 victory. It was the second goal of the night for Jordan, whose first goal on a corner kick with 2:30 remaining in regulation helped keep the Lady Tigers alive for the overtime heroics.
“As the game progressed, I could tell our conditioning that we’ve been working on since the first week of January paid off again tonight, as it paid off in the overtime against Central,” says coach Mike Hines. “We still had gas in the tank, and it looked like Neosho got a little tired.”
For a while, it looked like conditioning wouldn’t be a factor. After a scoreless first half, Neosho scored on a breakaway to take a 1-0 lead with 25 minutes remaining. They held that lead for 22 minutes, until Jordan’s corner kick tied it.
Hines says Neosho’s size and physical style of play forced him to make some lineup adjustments. He credited two midfielders, Michayla Shanks and Kheiara Dodd, for matching Neosho’s physicality and turning in important minutes.
” left mid was big and physical, and I put Michayla in there and said, ‘Go bang with her. Let her know you’re on the field.’ And that’s what she did,” Hines says.
“I put Kiki in there as a holding mid in the first half and I don’t even know if I ever took her off again. She gave us some great minutes,” he says. “I always feel like a player is doing what they’re supposed to be doing when I hear the other coaches complaining about them. And I heard them call her number several times tonight. She comes in hard and she disrupts the play.”
The win improves Republic’s record to 10-1. Three months ago, Hines says he would have considered that kind of record a “lofty goal” for his team, which lost most of its scoring from the past four seasons.
“I’ll be honest and say in January and February, I really liked the composition of the personalities on the team, but I didn’t really know if we were boing to be able to score,” Hines says. “I thought we’d be able to defend as well as we ever have. But we had that question mark on how we were going to be able to put that ball in the back of the net. With the evolution of Emily Jordan, Lesleigh Fenton, and Jocelyn Carpenter, when we put them together up top, they can create some problems for some other teams. That’s what they did tonight. They kept Noesho on their heels for a lot of the second half.”