Flipped in forty

MARION — The Eagles had opportunities in the first half, but time and time again they could not capitalize.

Finally, they broke through on a through ball for Maddox Huffman.

With a 1-0 lead and less than a minute left in the first half, the Eagles were riding a wave of emotion and momentum.

The Patriots let that last exactly 40.2 seconds.

Like a 2-minute drill in football, the Patriots marched down the field and put a goal of their own on the board.

With the score knotted up, the wind left the Eagles’ sails, and things were never the same in the second half.

After a goal with 17.2 seconds remaining in the first half, the Jay County High School boys soccer team seized control of IHSAA Class 3A Sectional 23 semifinal hosted by Eastbrook on Wednesday against the Delta Eagles for a 4-1 victory.

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Jay County boys soccer sectional semifinal vs. Delta (10/9/2024)

The win secured the Patriots (13-2) a spot in Saturday’s sectional championship game against the undefeated host, Eastbrook, which took down Oak Hill 2-0 in the second semifinal game. Jay County will take on the team that finished 13th in the Indiana Soccer Coaches Association poll at 7 p.m.

“It’s an awesome feeling,” said first-year JCHS coach Rodney Reynolds. “The kids, they just tore it up, man. They found a way to get the game going in our direction.

“They couldn’t have played a better second half. In the first half, we were a little worried, but they came alive. (During) the talk at halftime, morale was up everybody was pumped and they didn’t want to go home.

“That’s the thing with this group, they don’t want to quit.”

Reynolds said his team came out flat in the first half, leading to a plethora of shots on the goal by Delta (10-7). Jay County kept things under control with Peyton Yowell manning the goal and getting some extra assistance from his defenders, with Ashton Castillo and Aryian Montes making goal-line saves.

That didn’t last as Cooper Pierce passed the ball upfield and Huffman found an angle past Castillo. The Eagles’ leading scorer — he finished with 26 goals on the year — didn’t waste the opportunity, putting the ball in the top left corner with just 57.4 seconds remaining.

The Patriots took immediate action.

They quickly pushed down the field, before the ball got cleared out of bounds just before the 18-yard box. Cayden Buckland quickly threw the ball in to Levi Muhlenkamp, who dished it off to Dylan Marentes in the middle. With only one chance to tie before the intermission, Marentes found the net, swinging the momentum back the way of Jay County at 17.2.

“Huge, huge,” Reynolds said of the goal. “To be honest with you, from my perspective, that goal that was scored, that kick-fired the offense and got them going. … They had it in their minds, ‘We need to tie this up before halftime.’ And boom, there it was. It was a game changer.”

While the goals at the end of the half uplifted the Patriots, they dragged the Eagles down.

“I think that absolutely affected them, and that’s happened to us a couple of times,” said Delta coach Tony Pierce. “We’ve had that little switch off, where we scored a goal and said, ‘OK, we’re going to take a little breath.’ We get comfortable then and as you can see they scored right away. It took us a while to play out of that, so just unfortunate.”

Things were never the same in the second half.

Like the first Jay County goal, Marentes and Muhlenkamp connected two more times after the intermission.

The first came at the 30:14 mark, when Muhlenkamp executed a give-and-go with Marentes to put the ball in and reach a two-score lead. (The goal also extended his JCHS career goal record to 82.)

The second time, Marentes took the ball himself to get it in at the 20:38 mark.

“We’ve been playing since many years back,” Marentes said of his connection with Muhlenkamp. “We don’t even have to talk. We just know where we’re going to be and it’s perfect positioning. … We have to have that intensity that we had in the second half. We knew we were still in the game and that’s all we needed.”

JCHS first took the lead in the second half on a goal from Blake Collins. The sophomore got a through ball from defender Iker Nelson and beat defender Waylen Stewart for a one-on-one with goalkeeper Elijah Bell. Collins placed the ball at the top of the net out of Bell’s reach to go up 2-1. While the Patriots found ways to score in the second half, they also locked down a Delta offense that averaged over four goals per game.

A key to that defensive line was Castillo, who marked Huffman the entire game. He did everything he could to stay between Huffman and the goal and poked the ball away when passes came through.

“I think his speed and his body size (make him difficult to guard),” said Castillo. “He’s a really muscular dude. … I just had to stay in front of him and keep up my speed.”

The few times Delta strikers found their way past the back line, Yowell stepped up to make the save, totaling 10 on the game.

Jay County has the shot to redeem an overtime loss from last year’s sectional championship — Mississinewa took the title 2-1 — to clinch its second regional berth in three years.

Eastbrook is looking to snap a five year drought, as its last sectional championship came at home in 2018.

The last time the two teams met was in the 2022 sectional championship, when the Patriots claimed the title in a 2-0 victory. For JCHS to get a similar result on Saturday, Reynolds is going to look for a better start against the undefeated Panthers.

“So, we’ve got to show up and play just like we did, but start out faster, because the key to this whole thing is to run with it,” Reynolds said. “You punch one goal in a sectional championship, that’s great, but man, if you punch two goals, that’s a game-changer.  … We’ve gotta go out and we’ve got to do it again. We’ve got to fight, we’ve got to find it and we’ve got to keep fighting.

“It has to be the team. They have to come out and they have to want it. I think the second half showed this team really wants it.”