Hornet win not enough to make playoffs

BY STEVE HANF
 SALISBURY POST

Salisbury’s soccer team won Monday night.

And lost.

The Hornets fought with Ledford for 75 minutes Monday before pulling out a 3-1 win to close out the season. Meanwhile, East Davidson was battling in Lexington for a 2-1 victory. That game clinched a playoff berth for the Golden Eagles — a berth the Hornets have owned for the past 11 seasons.

“We picked a lousy year to have a 9-3 season and have only two representatives go to the state playoffs,”Salisbury head coach Tom Sexton said. “Of all the teams that are going to be in that thing, we’ll be just as good as most of them.”

Two crushing losses to East Davidson earlier in the season turned Monday’s match into an unexpected season finale. The Hornets’ 9-3 record was good enough for third place in the league, maybe even a tie for second, depending on Wednesday’s High Point Central-East Davidson matchup. But East owns all the tie-breakers and will join High Point as the Class 2ACentralCarolina Conference’s postseason representatives.

“It’s different. It hurts hearing it,”Salisbury’s Daniel Butner said. “There’s some quality teams in our conference this year, a lot more than Iexpected. To tell you the truth, I expected us to walk through the conference with a breeze. I was quite surprised with the level of play that the conference put out.”

The Hornets and Panthers displayed that high-quality soccer Monday night. Butner gave his team an early lead with a long throw-in to the goal mouth that Daniel Wallace headed in.

Ledford, also fighting for its playoff hopes, evened the match five minutes before the half when Chris Meredith tapped in a long throw.

That quickened the pace. If Ledford (13-7-1 overall, 8-4 CCC) won last night, its 9-3 record would have been good enough for second place thanks to a tiebreaker edge with East Davidson.

The Panthers just missed on several good chances in the second half, turned away by junior keeper Seth Ruhlman.

“He had an incredible second half,”Sexton said. “He pulled it out of the fire for us with four high-quality saves. That was probably his best half of the year.”

The offense made it stand up. With five minutes remaining, Alex Beaver emerged from a scrum in the middle of the goal box and tapped a pass to Bill-Michael Goodman. He sent the ball past keeper BenKiefer for a 2-1 lead.

Minutes later, Butner broke away down the left sideline and cut toward the goal, but he got tripped in the top of the box. No whistles blew, but it didn’t matter — Butner still managed to get the pass off to Goodman, who had a wide-open shot from 15 yards out to clinch the win.

“We knew it was going to be our last match. We wanted to end on a good one,”Goodman said. “We just got together at the end and made some plays.”

After the final whistle blew, and the teams lined up for that final handshake and final huddle, the dejected Panthers trudged off the field. The Hornets left without their heads hanging quite as badly, but the fact remained that two of last season’s CCCplayoff squads were done until next year.

“The teams that are there earned it. That’s why you play everybody twice,”Ledford head coach Scott Dalton said. “East Davidson is a team that really over-achieved this year. They won every close game they were in and they earned it.

“It’ll be strange. Maybe we can learn from it.”

That’s something Sexton is counting on.

“I hope the guys that are returning remember what this feels like,”Sexton said. “We haven’t won our last game of the year in 12 years. We always get eliminated some place in the playoffs. It’s nice to win the last one, but by God, this is too early.

“We’re not used to playing a soccer season that ends on Oct. 23. This is not very bearable right now.”

n

NOTES: Salisbury finished with a 13-8-1 overall record. The three league losses were two more than the Hornets suffered over the past two seasons. … Salisbury’s six seniors all got to start: Michael Glasgow, Chris Berry, Justin Leonard, David Pinkston, Eric Taylor and Jeff Sheehan. Sheehan played throughout the game with a cast on his arm after breaking his thumb two weeks ago against North Rowan.