[Baltimore Sun] Maria Brogno scores overtime winner for No. 9 Mt. Hebron in 2-1 win over No. 6 Howard
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Tim Deppen had multiple challenges on his plate Tuesday: How is he supposed to simultaneously motivate his Mt. Hebron girls soccer team for two games compressed into two evenings?. And how can he convert their belief into multiple successful finishes?
His Vikings have been humming, refusing to lose ever since its season opener. But they knew that this week would provide a slew of obstacles. Playing Reservoir on Tuesday was one thing, but the Wednesday match at undefeated Howard loomed even greater without the luxury of rest.
Much of the team was intimidated by the untimely matchup, but this was a sentiment their coach couldn’t echo, much less encourage. He needed them to take Reservoir seriously, but also had to find a way to illustrate the Howard Lions as something other than an unstoppable force.
“I was saying everything in my power not to get them to skip past Reservoir, because coming into this week, we knew that Howard was probably gonna be our hardest opponent, just looking at their record,” Deppen said. “But right before the game, I brought out my little pregame notes and went over the fact that … it was, like, five of the six teams we beat. You know who they haven’t played yet? Us.”
The Vikings met the challenge. They responded in the short term. A minute after Howard took a second-half lead, Ava Skaggs tied it. Then, they ended things on their own terms in overtime, 2-1, with a Maria Brogno go-ahead penalty kick to hand the Howard Lions their first loss in sudden death.
“I think we really deserved that, coming off of two [other] overtimes,” Brogno said, referring to the lone loss and lone tie that make up their 6-1-1 record. “I think it just really feels good to beat the only undefeated team in the county.”
Even if Howard (6-1) avoided the teams that gave Mt. Hebron trouble, humanizing the opponent beforehand still took some work. The Lions entered the showdown earning each win as a well-balanced juggernaut that only allowed three goals across six games, boasting the shutdown defenders to muddy up any game along with attackers with range from well outside of the keeper’s box.
That included Sydney Rhodes, who knocked in Wednesday’s first goal in the 48th minute from 25 yards out to continue her streak of scoring in every Howard game.
That lead was short lived, though, as Mt. Hebron went right back to dirtying up Howard’s third of the pitch and submitting a rebuttal just a minute after that backbreaker. Deppen, confident in his team’s ability to respond, saw this as a fixable slip-up.
“I knew that if they were gonna score, it was going to be from 30 yards out,” he said. “We couldn’t pressure Sydney fast enough. The comment that kept coming up was, ‘Howard will shoot from anywhere.’ It’s literally what we’ve been talking about for 24 hours.”
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He let his defense do the talking before Rhodes’ rocket, and went right back to having his players insert their bodies in every passing lane and creating turnovers before the Lions could get within shooting range from the goal, even by their heightened standards.
Their ball-hawking bought them much more time in the home team’s territory, where they got off considerably more looks, and it enabled them to come from behind and avenge the Mt. Hebron-Howard boys game that preceded the marquee girls matchup.
In the boys game, the Vikings and Lions engaged in 89 minutes of a two-way stalemate before Howard’s Luke Penn rifled in a bouncer from even farther out than where Rhodes would go on to score from in the final 20 seconds, handing Mt. Hebron’s boys a heartbreaking finish. If nothing else, this provided the girls some extra motivation just in case.
“We were preparing for it to go into overtime and keep doing our warm-up,” Brogno said. “It ended up not going into overtime, but we saw how devastated a Hebron team looked and how happy the Howard team looked when there was still time left. We can’t let that happen to us.”
The Vikings will finally enjoy an off-day on Thursday before finishing with their third game of the week on Friday against Centennial, where the Vikings will look to go 3-0 across the four-day span. Howard, for their part, will look to use that same day to get back in the win column against Hammond.
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