Warriors win battle, Scots settle for second in PSAC championship

ERIE — Off the heels of a 3-1 upset victory over the PSAC’s top seeded and the nation’s fifth ranked team Gannon on Friday afternoon, the Edinboro women’s soccer team was set to take on East Stroudsburg for the Scots’ first ever PSAC championship match. It would take more than regulation to settle the score.

Tied at 1-1 after 90 minutes, freshman forward Alex Pickett, streaking down the field, set up an open Shea Neal for a one-on-one breakaway scoring chance. Neal, a junior midfielder, beat sophomore goaltender Sarah Baskey to score just inside the left post.

Neal’s goal for seventh-seeded East Stroudsburg (11-6-2) came with just 2:01 remaining in the first overtime period to secure the 2015 PSAC women’s soccer championship Sunday afternoon at McConnell Family Stadium in Erie.

Breaking the Scots’ five match winning streak, East Stroudsburg won their second straight conference title with the win. The Warriors defeated West Chester in the quarterfinals and Slippery Rock in the semifinals prior to avenging a regular season loss to Edinboro (2-1 on Oct. 24).

“If you asked me at the beginning of the year, I wasn’t sure that we’d be in this position,” head coach Gary Kagiavas said. “Everything we’ve done to this point has kind of been a bonus. As in any other teams in the conference, you play hard, you train hard, you train every day and you try to get yourself here and we were unlucky and we didn’t get the job finished.”

The Fighting Scots (14-7) got the scoring started as they took a 1-0 lead in the 16th minute of the match as junior defender Shannon Regan scored her first goal of the season.

Regan, the General McLane product, was set up in the middle of the field as junior Alex Brown perfectly placed the ball for a Regan header that beat Warriors’ goaltender Jules Harris to the back of the net.

“The whole plan with all the corner kicks is just to put the thing in the box and hopefully we can get a deflection or something. Shannon won that ball easily. You saw with our corner kicks, we’ve used them; we’ve got three or four different varieties. We felt today, if we put the ball in the box, we got a good chance of scoring and Shannon scored.”