EV will savor season that ended at playoffs

It’s been a long, long road.

Seven seniors and a standout junior saw their East Valley soccer careers come to an end when West Valley-Yakima’s literal final shot dripped across the goal line in the first-round State 3A playoffs Tuesday.

With the whistle in the referee’s mouth to signal the end of regulation play, the undefeated Rams pushed across the only goal of a game that was contested over 82 hard-fought minutes for a 1-0 victory.

“That was a pretty tough way to lose,” senior Katie Storey said. “We were a little tight in the first half after that long bus ride down there, but we played them tough.”

The loss was the final game as a Knight for seniors Storey, Naomi Varney, Katlyn Laughlin, Kim Bendio, Tiffany Vaudrey, Lindsay Jacobs and Rachel Shaw. It was also the final game at East Valley for junior Lucy Giblette, who will move with her family to Colorado.

“This has been just a great group of seniors – and Lucy has been just like having another senior – and they’ve really worked hard,” second-year coach Jeff Rose said. “They’ve set the tone for this team. They work hard, they don’t get distracted and they play together.

“We’ve been telling them all year long to just play the game and let us worry about the referees. They’ve done a really great job of doing that.”

That ability came in handy in the final two games.

Against Hanford, the Knights had the go-ahead goal waved off midway through the first half. Against the Rams, there were several puzzling calls.

“The referee issued us a couple of yellow cards and said that she’d warned us,” Storey said. “But she’d never said a word. There were a couple of calls that we just didn’t understand.”

For East Valley, the state playoff berth was a first for a sport that has seen three head coaches in the past four years and been good enough to contend in the Greater Spokane League against some of the best Class 4A teams in the state before dropping back to Class 3A this season.

“We had success last year, but this year has been more stable,” Shaw said. “It helps that we play club together. We know each other and are used to playing together.”

That senior unity was tested early on. The GSL schedule top-loaded the toughest teams into the first half of the season – opening up with University, Ferris, Mead, Gonzaga Prep and Mt. Spokane all before the first week of October ended. Through their first eight games, the Knights were 3-5.

“We were competitive in all of those games,” Storey said. “We knew the games weren’t going to get any tougher than that and we knew we were going to beat some teams in the second half and get into the playoffs.”

“Most of those games, we were really close after a half,” Shaw said. “They only wore us down in the second half. That gave us a lot of confidence later on. We knew that if we could stay with these teams, there weren’t going to be too many other teams that were going to be able to dominate us.”

The Knights won five of their next six games to finish the regular season at 7-6, then won four of six games in playoffs – losing only to Hanford, a loss they avenged Saturday to get into the state playoffs, and West Valley-Yakima. In all, the team won 12 of 20 games.

In the end, that’s what the Knights chose to remember on the four-hour bus ride back from Yakima.

“We played our best, and it was hard to see it end, but we were pretty satisfied with what we’d accomplished,” Storey said, philosophically. “It was a fun ride home, so long as we didn’t talk about the game.”