REBELS RALLY TO DENY BULLETS A TITLE SHOT
By Ben Kaufmann
County Courier
TOWNSHEND – With a little over four minutes left in Wednesday’s back-and-forth Division III semifinal, No. 3 BFA-Fairfax was tied at three with No. 2 Leland & Gray when BFA’s Paige Cargill rolled a ball from midfield to teammate Emma Spiller near the top of the Rebels’ box. Spiller flicked the ball over her head and over the two defenders on her back, then snuck between the two and knocked a crafty shot off the right goalpost and in to put her team ahead and complete her hat trick.
Spiller and her teammates didn’t get to celebrate long. Leland & Gray’s defense quickly pointed to the sideline, where the line official had his flag raised for an offside call no Rebel players had considered appealing for and no Fairfax players were concerned about in the slightest. Vermont high school soccer is some years away from implementing VAR, so there was no further discussion on the curious decision.
Any Hollywood screenwriter could tell you what happened next: With the dumbfounded Bullets slow to react, Leland & Gray rushed to the other end of the field and Abby Towle knocked in her third goal of the day to give the hosts a 4-3 lead they’d hang onto for the final four minutes.
BFA will regret being in the position of a late tie regardless of its concerns about the offside call. After yielding a goal to Towle with 17:16 gone in the first half, Fairfax responded with three goals of its own before the break. Needing to just hold the Rebels to one goal or less over the final 40 minutes, Fairfax surrendered two in the first six minutes of the second half to invite trouble.
“It was hard. It was hard to come back from that,” said BFA coach JoJo Lynch. “We came out very strong. The same thing happened to us last year, we got ahead in the beginning and kind of got caught on our heels a little bit.”
Unfortunate endings aside, BFA’s first half was a thing of beauty and it began with Spiller. With her team down 1-0, the freshman cut off her defender to accept a gorgeous pass from Marie Larose and cooly finished to knot the game at 1-1 exactly one minute after Leland & Gray had taken the lead. Thanks to an impressive recovery run from Larose a few minutes later to prevent a breakaway, the game was still tied when Raegan Decker crossed a ball from the enplane to the center of the box and Spiller struck a perfect one-timer to give the Bullets a 2-1 lead with 15 minutes to go in the first half.
The strong finishes from Spiller were a great sight for Fairfax. Though she recovered to draw a crucial penalty, Spiller was visibly shaken after missing a golden opportunity to score in BFA’s semifinal comeback win over Windsor. Spiller, apparently a fan of Ted Lasso, turned into a goldfish and forgot any worries before getting off the bus in Townshend on Wednesday.
BFA-Fairfax’s Raegan Decker races the goalie for a ball in the second half of the Bullets’ 4-3 semifinal loss at Leland & Gray Wednesday (Ben Kaufmann, County Courier) 
BFA-Fairfax freshman Emma Spiller can’t believe it after scoring her second goal in under seven minutes to turn a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 lead. Spiller’s Bullets ended up losing Wednesday’s Division III semifinal at Leland & Gray, 4-3 (Ben Kaufmann, County Courier)
“I pulled her off the field after she was upset in the last game and just said to her that you have the skill, just get the job done. Don’t focus on the things that you’re not doing as well, focus on the things you are doing well,” Lynch said of her conversation on Saturday with Spiller.
BFA’s great first half still wasn’t done. Less than a minute after Spiller’s second goal, she led Ava Ardovino on a breakaway to make it a 3-1 Fairfax lead at halftime.
“At halftime I say to the girls one thing you’re doing well and one thing you need to improve on,” Lynch said of her talk at halftime Wednesday. “The first thing out of my mouth was “One thing we’re doing well is we’re putting the ball in the freaking net!””
Fairfax goalie Kamryn Taylor, who stopped seven shots Wednesday, was busy from the jump in the second half. Taylor made a difficult catch on a long free kick from Towle just 20 seconds into the half. Just over two minutes later, the Rebels notched their second goal of the day after the Bullets’ failed to clear a corner kick. Three minutes after that, Towle knocked in a rebound to stun BFA and make it a 3-3 game.
In fairness to the Rebels, if Spiller had completed her hat trick, it really should have only been to tie the game. With 16 minutes to go and the game knotted at 3-3, Towle got around everyone – Taylor included – and rolled a ball at the empty net. Out of nowhere, BFA sweeper Kali Wooster appeared and cleared the ball just before it could cross the goal line and preserved the tie.
The way the final minutes played out made for an emotional Fairfax sideline following the final whistle. As the dust settled, Lynch was able to appreciate this special group which only lost one game in the regular season and was inches from taking BFA to its first championship game since 2012 in pursuit of a first-ever title.
“This season was amazing,” Lynch said, going on to recognize the fine sendoff her team received while boarding the bus at school Wednesday. ”Just seeing the five and six year olds out here cheering these guys, they don’t even know. It just shows you how close-knit our community is and how behind our team they are.”
Though she’ll return freshmen superstars Ardovino, Spiller and Cargill next season, Lynch loses a massive and impressive senior class. Wooster, Taylor, Larose, Bridgett Dunn, Anna Black, Molly Wimette, Nikki Cholewa, Gabby Jones, Emmi Sturm and Maddie King will all graduate this spring.
“This group of seniors is special to my heart because they started with me. I’ve had them for four years, they’ve been my squad,” Lynch said of the class of 2022. “I could not ask them to do anything else today, I’m proud of them.”
“They didn’t lose today. These girls are winners regardless of the outcome of the game.”
