An undefeated, untied regular season did much more than give the Fayetteville-Manlius boys soccer team the top seed for the Section III Class AA playoffs.
It also made the Hornets the top-ranked team in the latest state Class AA poll, a big honor that would mean little if F-M didn’t secure its first outright sectional title in a decade.
Yet any concerns about possible post-season nerves dissipated quickly in last Friday night’s AA quarterfinal at Swan Pond, where a large, boisterous home crowd cheered the Hornets to a 6-0 victory over no. 8 seed Liverpool.
Back when the two teams first met Sept. 25, F-M won by a 5-0 margin, and now it caught the Warriors coming off a tough 3-2 opening-round win over West Genesee two nights earlier.
Rested and refreshed, the Hornets were in top form from the outset. Tysen Tressness put the Hornets on the board just 2:10 into the game, and it got to 2-0 with Dante Belmonte’s header in the 15th minute.
Tresness returned to convert again right before halftime, making it a three-goal margin at the break, and the Hornets kept adding to that margin, dealing with myriad injuries on the roster by putting in some new starters and even using some players called up from the JV ranks.
F-M doubled its margin in the second half, with a pair of goals from Anthony Kousmanidis and another from Peter D’Amato. Several different players, including Connor Snow, Brennan Haley, Jules Ngadula, Michael Myagkota and Julian Razmjou, earned assists.
With that win, F-M moved to 17-0 and advanced to a Class AA semifinal against no. 4 seed Cicero-North Syracuse, who lost a pair of 1-0 matches to the Hornets (one of them in overtime) during the regular season. C-NS had to survive Nottingham by that same 1-0 margin in its quarterfinal game. The winner meets Baldwinsville or Fowler in the sectional final.
In stark contrast to the role of hunted favorite that the boys Hornets carry, the F-M girls soccer team was a no. 7 seed going into its sectional Class AA tournament, and wasn’t expected to go far.
Yet in last Thursday night’s AA quarterfinal at no. 2 seed Baldwinsville, the Hornets staged a second-half comeback and pushed the game to overtime before its upset bid ran out of gas and the Bees, led by Hailey Couchman, pulled out a 4-2 decision.
A pair of regular-season defeats to B’ville left F-M with more than enough motivation, and it didn’t get discouraged, even when the Bees inched in front, 1-0, and stayed there going into the second half.
Taking advantage of some defensive lapses from B’ville, the Hornets’ Jamison Seabury and Rachel Dobricki both put in unassisted goals, and when the Bees only converted once in response, the cold, wet battle went to 20 mandatory minutes of overtime at 2-2.
In the last minute of the first OT period, though, Couchman, who already had a goal on the night, put one past Haley Everding for the second time. Not content with that, Couchman returned to get a third goal in the second extra period to help seal it and end F-M’s season with a 5-7-4 record.
