A strong regular-season and playoff run for the Wakefield Warriors boys soccer team ended with a runner-up finish in the Virginia High School League Class 6 state tournament.
After a scoreless first half in the June 14 title match at Glen Allen High near Richmond, Wakefield fell to the Herndon Hornets, 3-0.
The teams met three times previously this season, with Herndon winning two of those contests, one in the preceding 6D North Region tournament title match.
Wakefield was 2-1 in the state competition, reaching the semifinals and title games for the first time in program history and playing in a state tourney for just the second time.
“This season, nobody counted on us getting this far, so we made our school proud,” Wakefield coach Eddie Carrasquillo told ARLnow.
“We have enjoyed every moment of this,” Carrasquillo said. “It hurts not to win it, because we all wanted that. But we are proud of what we accomplished.”
Overall, Wakefield finished 5-3 in the playoffs, going 1-1 in the Liberty District tournament, then 2-1 in both the region and state tournaments.
The Warriors were without one of the squad’s top players — Graysen Colglazier — during the state tournament, owing to an injury.
“He was a big loss,” Carrasquillo said.
In a state-tournament first-round game against the Occoquan Region champion and host Robinson Rams in Fairfax, the match was tied at 2 at the end of regulation and four five-minute overtime periods.
Wakefield then made all five of its penalty-kick attempts, with Robinson making its first four. Warriors’ goalie Andrew Jackson stopped the Rams’ fifth to earn the victory.
Making the penalty kicks for Wakefield were Bruce Gonzales Cordova, Ricardo Perez-Justiniano, Ryan Goff-Glennon, Andrew Soto and Jerry Lopez Felix.
“We didn’t play our best overall game, but we played well enough,” Carrasquillo said.
Gonzales Cordova connected on a penalty kick early in the contest, then Ricardo Perez-Justiniano scored on a long free kick with 13:57 left in regulation against Robinson to tie the game at 2.
Robinson had multiple scoring chances throughout the match, with two shots hitting the cross bar and others just missing. The Rams also had a goal disallowed because of an offside call.
In the state semifinal against the Gar-Field Red Wolves, Wakefield rallied from a 2-0 deficit to score two goals in the final 10 minutes. Emmanuel Ashley scored the first off a pass from Gustavo Gonzales. Then Gonzales scored off a corner kick from Cordova.
Like the Robinson win, the score was tied at 2 after regulation and overtime periods. Gar-Field then scored two penalty kicks but the Warriors had four, coming from Perez-Justiniano, Goff-Glennon, Soto and Lopez Felix.
NOTES: The Carrasquillo brothers have a 3-0 record in state-tournament games held at Robinson Secondary School over the years. Eddie’s older brother, Jimmy, was 2-0 at Robinson back in 2016 when he coached then-Washington-Lee (now Washington-Liberty) to the Group AAA state championship … Wakefield won three trophies this season, two for being runner-up in the region and state tournaments. The other was winning the Arlington Cup for having the best performance against its two county public-school rivals.
