Top-seeded Colts Neck took a two-goal lead into halftime then dominated time of possession in the second half to defeat seventh-seeded Freehold, 2-0, in Thursday’s NJSIAA North 2, Group 3 final at Colts Neck’s home field.
In defeating defending champion Freehold, the Cougars captured the school’s first-ever sectional field hockey championship in program history.
“This is our first ever (title) in 19 years so it really feels awesome,” said Colts Neck head coach Maria Merlucci following their historic win. “These girls have worked their butts off for three months and I have six amazing seniors that have committed themselves for four years. We’re 17-1-1 and they had a mission that they were going to put up a new banner in the gym and now we can.”
Senior Ally Royle was on the post and got a deflection in for a 1-0 lead with a little over 13:00 minutes left in the opening half and about eight minutes later, senior Aryana Muscara did a reverse sweep right into the cage for a 2-0 advantage.
Both Colts Neck goals came off of penalty corners as the Cougars totaled 11 penalty corners for the game while the Colonials had seven.
It was Royle’s eighth and Muscara’s seventh goals of the season and junior Jenna Filingeri picked up her fourth assist of the season on Royle’s goal.
The Cougars shut out all three opponents on their way to the title and now have 12 on the year and have only given up 12 goals all year.
“After we went up 2-0 we just wanted to keep them out of our circle as much as possible,” Merlucci said of her team’s strategy in the second half. “We’re a second-half team and I knew once we put a couple in we’d get fired up. We have a great defense this year and we tried to work off of that. Maddy Bellows is our anchor back there and I thought she came through strong today. We marked real well and our corner defense shut down their corners.”
Merlucci also mentioned junior Liz Whalen and Muscara on defense and sophomore Stephanie LoNano in goal. LoNano finished with four saves for the Cougars.
In four short years the Colts Neck field hockey program has made the leap from a two-win team in 2014 to currently being ranked fourth in the Shore Conference while boasting a 17-1-1 record.
In 2014, the Cougars finished 2-16-1 failing to quality for the Shore Conference Tournament or the state playoffs.
A year later in 2015, Colts Neck made a significant jump, improving to 9-8-1; however, after starting out 2-6-1 in their first nine games of the season they failed to qualify for the Shore Conference Tournament. However, they finished strong going 7-2 in their final nine games and qualified for the states.
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