Perryville girls soccer coach Jerry Fulton felt like his team had a wake-up call at one point this season.
Perryville started the year 12-0-1 and then fell to conference foes Windsor and rival St. Vincent at the end of April in consecutive games to essentially end their bid for a conference title. Fulton believed that the hiccup helped get his team where it is today.
Where is that? Another district championship.
Second seed Perryville shut out top seed Fredericktown 2-0 in the Class 2, District 1 championship game Tuesday at The Bank of Missouri Soccer Complex. The championship is the program’s second straight.
“They knew they could do it, but it took a little bit of convincing to get them there,” Fulton said. “We told them all year that this could happen. If it hadn’t been for a stumble there during the season, I thought this team could go undefeated. I thought it served as a wake-up call for us. Sometimes that’s what a team needs. I’ll trade a conference title for a district title any day.”
A focal point of the Pirates’ game plan was to shut down Fredericktown senior Alivia Buxton, a Mississippi State soccer commit. She came into the game with 66 goals on the year and Fulton felt that if his team could stop her they would have a good chance of winning.
“We weren’t going to let (Buxton) beat us,” Fulton said. “Usually when they played us, they played her back and they were trying to come up. When we started the game, they played her up which gave us the back open, which is how we got the two goals. In the second half, Kyla’s (Schnurbusch) job was, ‘If she went to the bathroom, you go with her,’ and she did an excellent job at that. She has 66 goals on the season, but we’ve played them for 195 minutes and she’s never scored on us. That just goes to show the heart of this team.”
With Schnurbusch occupied with slowing down Buxton, someone else would have to handle the scoring punch. That someone happened to be Carlie Holdman.