With his team trailing 1-0 at halftime, coach Kevin Hauck pounded home one message over and over to his lady Tigers:
“This is our half. We’ve been a second-half team all year. This is our half.”
He was right.
Playing in a gloomy drizzle with no lights or scoreboard because of a power outage, Emily Jordan tied the game with about 30 minutes remaining. Charlotte Mikkelsen fired home the game-winner about eight minutes later to deliver a district championship to Republic for the first time in three years. The Lady Tigers held on to win 2-1.
“I think they like to see how much gray hair I can grow throughout the season,” Hauck says. “But I think we’re a well-conditioned team and…we do get teams tired. When the second half comes around, we’re ready to go. We’re energized still, and other teams are pretty tired in the second half.
Willard had taken it to Republic in the first half, scoring a goal in the 12th minute and maintaining their lead until halftime. Republic threatened to tie the game in the final 5-10 minutes of the half, but couldn’t get the ball past Willard’s keeper.
From the opening seconds of the second half, though, Republic was on the attack.
“Right out of the gates in the second half, we did a good job of pressuring. You could tell Willard came out a little slower in that second half and we were able to jump on it and keep the pressure right on them,” Hauck says.
The equalizer came about ten minutes into the half, when Emily Griffith found Jordan in the middle of the field about 20 yards from the goal. Jordan had time to wind up and fire a left-footed kick into the back of the net to tie the game.
Eight minutes later, it was Mikkelsen’s turn to be the hero. With an assist from Madi Mitchell, Mikkelsen took the ball in the far corner of the goal box, about 18 yards out. She spun away from a defender and pounded the ball high at Willard’s keeper. The wet ball slipped through the keeper’s grasp and rolled across the goal line to give Republic a lead it wouldn’t relinquish.
“The only thing I was thinking was I need to make that goal,” Mikkelsen says. The district-winning goal will be Mikkelsen’s last for the Lady Tigers. She’s a foreign-exchange student from Norway, and she’ll be returning home before the Lady Tigers play again next Tuesday in sectionals. Her time with the Lady Tigers has been new, because she never played organized soccer back home.
“It’s really fun to be a part of a team and to get close to everybody. It’s better, and it’s more fun,” she says.
Hauck was calling for Mikkelsen to take the shot when she found herself open momentarily.
“Charlotte has such a powerful kick. I knew anywhere around the top of the 18, she could put it on frame. She does it every day in practice and nobody wants to be in front of it. We had the momentum going. It was 1-1. We had a little bit of rain coming down–why not take a chance? I’m glad that she did,” he says.
The district championship is the first in three years for Republic. It also sets up a sectionals showdown with Carl Junction, the former team of Republic coach Kevin Hauck. The Lady Bulldogs beat Republic earlier this season.
Griffith, now a senior, still remembers a 3-2 loss at Carl Junction in the sectionals that ended her freshman season.
“For me, because I played in that game my freshman year, I am ready. I want to win that game so bad,” Griffith says. “From the beginning of this year, when I thought about districts, I thought ‘If we win districts, I want to play Carl in sectionals.’ I want to get them back because they beat us in the last few seconds of the game, and that hurt. With our coach being from Carl, it just makes it that much better, so we really want that game.”
Republic is 16-7. Carl Junction is 16-7-1. They play Tuesday at 6 pm at Carl Junction.