By Bob Sutton
Special to The Alamance News
Western Alamance’s Noah Barrett and Blake Bacchus will try to make it full circle with Western Alamance’s boys’ soccer team.
The senior duo will be among the key players when the Warriors aim for their second Class 3-A state championship in four seasons this weekend.
Barrett and Bacchus were on the school’s 2021 title team as freshmen.
“Get two rings,” Barrett said. “That’s what we’ve been after.”
Western will play in the season’s last game after toppling visiting Southern Durham 3-1 in Tuesday night’s East Region final.
“That has been the idea in our head,” Bacchus said. “This has been the whole motivation.”
The Warriors (24-1) will meet West Region champion Asheboro (27-2), which was the top seed in that bracket and defeated visiting Winston-Salem Reynolds 4-2 on Tuesday night, in the championship game at 6:00 p.m. Saturday at Mecklenburg County Sportsplex in Matthews.
“We knew we had a great team at the beginning of the season,” Western coach Camden Brooks said. “We knew we had the team to do it.”
Asheboro, which will be in its first championship game, defeated Western 4-3 in August in Asheboro in a non-conference game before the Warriors went on a 23-game winning streak.
Western had quite a send-off from the regional final, never trailing after Luis Guerrero’s goal with 16:31 remaining in the first half. Barrett added two penalty kicks.
Southern Durham (21-3-2) provided certain challenges Tuesday and part of that was its quest to make it an end-to-end game. That deviated from some of Western’s tendencies.
“You’ve got to win the aerial fights, the 50-50s,” Brooks said. “I thought our forwards contested, our back line contested. . . . You’ve got to adapt in these games.”
The first goal came courtesy of Dominic McNerney’s throw-in from the left side. That toss sent the ball to the mouth of the goal, and when the ball was deflected, Guerrero was there to convert.
Western went up 2-0 about eight minutes later. McNerney took the ball into the box and drew a foul, resulting in Barrett’s first penalty kick.
Southern Durham countered when Joseth Banegas scored 5:03 before halftime. That was the third goal allowed by the Warriors in five postseason games.
Then with about 28 minutes to play, Barrett delivered on another penalty kick. This came after Grant Bacchus charged down the field in transition and drew a foul after advancing the ball into the box.
“We knew this team would stab at the legs,” Barrett said of the Warriors’ ability to draw fouls.
Barrett, also a kicker for Western’s football team, suffered a torn knee ligament that cost him his junior season.
The second-seeded Warriors trounced No. 26 seed Dixon 7-0 last Thursday in the East Region’s third round. Next, Western stopped third-seeded Southern Nash 3-0 on Saturday.
Western stayed at home throughout the regionals. Fifth-seeded Southern Durham knocked off East Region top seed First Flight 1-0 on Saturday.
Class 2-A
Southeast Alamance’s season ended in the East Region semifinals.
Third-seeded Greene Central topped the seventh-seeded Stallions 4-2 on Saturday.
Southeast (18-7) was the Mid-Carolina Conference champion. The season for Greene Central (21-6) ended with Tuesday’s 2-0 loss at top-seeded Clinton.
Last Thursday, Southeast went to second-seeded Wallace-Rose Hill last Thursday and pulled out a 2-1 victory. The Stallions fell behind in the second half before A.J. Norman scored on a header off Bailey Frye’s corner kick for the tying goal and Edgar Carbajal provided the tiebreaking goal.
