Saturday,
November 23, 2014
By Cory K. Doviak
NJS.com Editorial Director
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Northern Highlands took home the Group 3 state championship trophy for the fourth straight year after its 4-0 win over Colts Neck on Saturday night. |
UNION-- By the numbers, most high school athletes will go through four years in a program without winning a state tournament game. There are not that many to go around and lots of teams and individuals make it their goal, which makes the competition fierce. On the flip side is Hana Kerner, the only senior in Northern Highlands' starting lineup. She will leave high school having played in 24 state playoff games in girls soccer while coming out on the winning side of each and every one of them.
And it is not like she was a bit player in any of them either. A starter up top in New Jersey's top program since her freshman year, Kerner, who will play next season at the University of Virginia, has earned her reputation as a big game player and on Saturday night she cemented her legacy at the Allendale school. Kerner scored a natural hat trick, the first three goals of the game, in a 4-0 win over Colts Neck that gave Northern Highlands its 24th straight state tournament win and its fourth straight outright Group 3 state title at Kean University in Union.
“It's really special. It says a lot about the program and the players involved and just what the coaches and my teammates have been able to accomplish over the last four years,” said Kerner, who also scored a hat trick in the 2012 final and scored seven total goals in four state final wins over her four year career. “Each year has its own significance. My first year stepping out on the field for the first time I was just trying to see what it was all about, but this year we had all the experience coming in and we just wanted to do everything we could to finish out the year strong.”
Highlands was missing a couple of players who chose a club tournament rather than the state final, it lost another starter, Clair Nam, to a knee injury recently and it gave up the first scoring chance of the game inside the first 30 seconds against Colts Neck. But no matter what hurdles are put in front of the Highlanders, they jump right over them and just keep on running. This one was never close after the first seven minutes.
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Frankie Tagliaferri set up an early scoring chance for Colts Neck. |
Goalkeeper Kayla Klatt bailed her team out early when, on Colts Neck's first foray into the offensive third of the game, Frankie Tagliaferri, the Cougars' talented sophomore playmaker, slipped a pass through for Bridgette King in the box. Klatt read it, made a bee line for it and took the ball off the boot of King before she could get off a shot.
“They connected a series of passes in the midfield and [King] broke through. They sent in a ball a little bit past the penalty mark and luckily I was able to get there before she did, ” said Klatt, who needed to make just two more saves the rest of the way. “That definitely set a tone. We knew we had to get serious, get composed and we knew that we were going to have to play defense really well today if we wanted to hold them off.”
That was the last nervous moment for Highlands, which used its ball movement, its over lapping runs and continual probing through balls to test the Cougars from every angle. Ariel Somple made a run into the corner and played the ball to the feet of Kerner inside the box. Kerner did the rest as she showed off her control in tight spaces before rifling a shot into the opposite corner for the 1-0 lead just seven minutes in.
Colts Neck was on the verge of surviving the first half down by just that single goal and even had a set piece opportunity inside the final minute to make something happen, but Highlands turned the negative into a positive. At the end of a counterattack, Claire Jamieson found Kerner in the middle and the senior striker deposited the ball in the net for the 2-0 halftime lead.
“That was the back breaker, that counter attack off of a set piece,” said Colts Neck head coach Doug Phillips. “It was not very well played and [Kerner] is just so good, so what are you going to do."
With the outcome pretty much decided, Highlands could go to work on some previously unstated goals and Kerner could keep pushing for the hat trick.
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Highlands senior Hana Kerner scored a hat trick in her final high school game and finished with 7 goals in four state finals appearances. |
“We were on our heels for the first minute, minute-and-a-half and it took us a little while to settle down, but scoring an early goal certainly helped us,” said Highlands head coach Tara Madigan. “We spoke at halftime about getting four goals. We felt that we had some opportunities in the first half that we didn't execute on. We wanted a shutout and we wanted four [goals], so I am very pleased.”
Kerner got her third on a breakaway in the 66th minute when she ran onto a long ball played out of the midfield by Casey Richards. With time and space up the right side, Kerner picked her head up and chose the opposite corner to make it 3-0. Richards capped the scoring with a floater across the face of goal and in with 12:01 left showing on second half clock.
It was a decisive way to close out yet another dominant season for Northern Highlands, which became just the fourth program to win four straight state titles. Kerner will be in Charlottesville, Virginia next season, but everybody else from the starting lineup will be back in search of No. 5 in 2015.
“I have spoken a lot this year about the players who have come before these guys and for somebody like Hana, who has been with us for four year, they set an example and they set a standard for these younger players,” said Madigan. “Some of the players we had out there tonight have never had this experience before and the players that have come before them have really set the tone for them.”
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