Cougars see successful season come to an end in sectional final

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By Darryl Mellema

Alphabetically-speaking, 'C' stood for 'Conant' at Friday's IHSA Class 3A Schaumburg Sectional title match.

'C' also stood for 'Cougars', the nickname for those blue-clad Conant players.

That third letter of the alphabet also represented 'Class' – as evidenced when Conant coach Jason Franco congratulated St. Charles North coach Ruth Vostal after he had seen his team's season end with a 5-0 defeat.

"Congratulations, I hope you go and win state, you have a great team," Franco said, displaying graciousness toward the team that had controlled play for most of the preceding 80 minutes of play.

"I don't know why, but we played our worst game and they played perhaps one of their better games," Franco said.

"We just had a comedy of errors, which you can't do against a good team, which is what they are."

Conant (12-6-3) went out of the tournament as the North Stars forced some mistakes, the Cougars made some unforced errors and St. Charles North had some solid play that was unaffected by anything, good or bad, that the Cougars did.

"They have some very dangerous players who, if you make one little mistake, it will end up in the back of the net," Franco said.

"And that happened tonight four times. There was maybe one goal that we didn't give them by making a mistake."

Trailing 1-0, Conant had two opportunities to tie the match. First Courtney Raetzman fed Becky Raimondo, who shot into the side netting. That chance came at the midpoint of the half.

Six minutes later, Kaitlin Chiero sent a curling shot just past the upper left corner of St. Charles North's goal.

Having survived those chances, St. Charles North scored the next goal through Leah DeMoss, who scored her team's opener.

Behind 2-0 at halftime, Conant had a mountain to climb in the second 40 minutes.

"I think, in the first half, we played them pretty even," Franco said. "Maybe in the second half, we had tired legs. There were lots of factors. But the biggest factor was the way that (St. Charles North) played.

"They outmuscled, outran and outplayed us all over the field. They deserve this because of the way they performed."

Conant does not graduate any players from this year's team and will certainly be a handful for any team on their schedule in 2011.

"We'll be back and we'll take this as a life lesson and see what happens next year," Franco said.

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