Francis Howell Central State Hopes Crushed by Oakville

It’s been 11 years since the Oakville Senior High boy’s soccer team has won a state championship, and the 2011 Tigers took one step closer to cementing their names into history with a 1-0 win over Francis Howell Central Saturday afternoon.

The win for the Tigers (20-7-1) marks Oakville’s first trip to the Missouri Class 3 semifinals in 10 years. In 2001, Oakville fell to Chaminade 4-0 in the state championship game after winning the title the previous season with a 2-1 victory in overtime over Francis Howell North. Today’s win has the Tigers playing Rock Bridge High School Friday evening at 6:00 p.m. at Blue Springs South High School in Kansas City, MO.

“Howell Central plays with a lot of intensity and emotion and nothing that we saw was unexpected,” Oakville head coach Dave Robben said. “I can’t say enough about their execution and their game plan that they did.”

The game also featured an interesting twist as Howell Central head coach Derek Phillips played for Robben at Oakville during the Tiger’s Final Four run in 1989.

“Derek has done a fantastic job here,” Robben said. “We played him earlier in the year and it was a 2-0 game back on Oct. 5 and since then we’ve been following him and his team has had to deal with some serious injuries. In fact today they lost No. 12 and they gave us all that we could handle.” 

Oakville scored its lone goal of the game about 20 minutes into the first half as Patrick McInerney ran in on a loose ball for a goal that just about every kid in high school soccer dreams about scoring.

“Coach told us to just go out there and pressure their backs as much as you can and when I went out there, Alex Dieckmann played a ball into the corner and I kept telling myself to pressure their backs,” McInerney said. “I ran through on the breakaway and finished it. I knew that if I could beat just one guy on their defense it would be just me and the keeper and I ended up putting it in the corner."

For Phillips and his Spartans, today’s trip to the state quarterfinal marked a huge step for a team that was 2-4 in the Gateway Athletic Conference last season and lost in the district finals. This season the Spartans were a part of a four-way tie with a 4-2 mark in conference action and a 17-9-3 mark overall. Saturday's game was the second quarterfinal appearance for Howell Central in school’s history.

“The kids committed themselves in the off-season to make this happen,” Phillips said. “They got into the weight room and they worked really hard in the preseason. It was an amazing group that took on leadership and the kids deserve the credit for getting to this point. Obviously we would have liked to have played on, but we worked hard, played good soccer and despite the injuries we had, players kept stepping on the field ready to play."

Howell Central’s Brett Hodges was proud of his team’s effort this season with the Spartans tying for the conference championship as well as its run to the state quarterfinals.

“Last year in conference play we were 2-5 and now we tied for the conference championship and I thought our skills really stepped up 100 percent and I’m really proud of our guys,” Hodges said. “We lost one of our key players in the first 10 minutes and we just couldn’t find that offense spark we needed. One thing about us is that we never gave up, even when we lost one of our key players we put our whole heart out there on the field and that’s one thing about this team that I really love.”

Oakville takes on Rock Bridge this Friday at 6 p.m. at Blue Springs South. Should the Tigers win, they will play in the championship game on Saturday at 6 p.m. If Oakville should lose in the state semifinal game, they would play in the third place game on Saturday at noon.