Just a few weeks into the season, the Lac La Biche U18 Lightning Queens girls soccer club already has a gold medal in the bag. The team was in Sherwood Park for a tournament last weekend, where the girls emerged victorious after a lengthy gold medal match against the host team that required nine rounds of penalty kicks to determine a winner.
Just a few weeks into the season, the Lac La Biche U18 Lightning Queens girls soccer club already has a gold medal in the bag. The team was in Sherwood Park for a tournament last weekend, where the girls emerged victorious after a lengthy gold medal match against the host team that required nine rounds of penalty kicks to determine a winner.
The championship game was Lac La Biche’ s second shot at beating Sherwood Park that weekend, after the team opened the tournament with a 3-2 loss to the host team. After the loss, the girls had to battle back to earn a spot in the medal round, putting up solid victories over Hinton (4-1), and St. Paul (4-0).
The battle wasn’ t over once they reached the championship game though - at half-time, the Lightning Queens found themselves in a 3-1 hole to Sherwood Park, but managed to tie the game in the second half to force extra time. After two five-minutes periods of extra time solved nothing, Lac La Biche was able to buckle down and win the gold in a dramatic set of penalty kicks. Al Bertschi, one of the team’ s coaches said he was proud of the team’ s perseverance throughout the tournament.
“Not only losing to them [Sherwood Park], but to find yourself down at the half, to rally back and win shows a lot of good character and a lot of good athleticism from our girls,” he said.
The team has a couple more tournaments on the horizon: the girls will travel to Millet on the weekend of June 13, before participating the Lakeland Cup in St. Paul the following weekend.
League play is also underway for the U18 girls. In three games, the team has 2-1 record. Bertschi has high expectations for the squad this season.
“The coaching staff is extremely pleased with the girls’ effort. They’ ve really improved over the last winter and summer season and have become a really good team,” he said. “I expect more tournament wins coming their way.”
The U18 girls weren’ t the only team to return from Sherwood Park with some hardware. The U14 Lightning Queens had a strong showing on the weekend as well, picking up a bronze medal for their effort.
The team finished first in their pool after victories over Jasper (7-0), and Sherwood Park DeHog (4-0) and a draw against Sherwood Park Edgar (4-4). In Sunday’ s medal round, the team came out flat in a morning game against Fort Saskatchewan, falling 6-3, but bounced back to beat Cold Lake 3-1 in the bronze medal game.
“The game against Fort Saskatchewan, they were competitive with the team but it was an 8 am start and that proved to be tough for us,” said Dianna Kryvenchuk, assistant coach of the U14 girls team. “They came back strong in the afternoon and they had strong teamwork, good passing, and were strong defensively and offensively.”
Head coach Kerry Kryvenchuk was pleased with his team’ s progress over the course of the season so far.
“They played really well, I was proud of them,” he said, adding that the improvement has happened quickly. “There were a lot of first years playing and they came a long way from where we started in our last tournament... we lost every game. This time we came out with a medal.”
The team’ s next tournament is in Camrose from June 5-7, before they too will participate in the Lakeland Cup in St. Paul on the weekend of June 21.
