Overtime win leads to state tourney

Finish second place in league

Two weeks ago it was nothing but doom and gloom for the Crested Butte Titans soccer team. A loss to Alamosa seemingly ended any shot at a post-season run for the team.
Nevertheless, the Titans stayed focused on the task at hand, looking to close the regular season with a couple of wins.
Little did they know the two wins would pay off so big.
Sitting in fourth place in the league standings the Titans headed to Telluride last Thursday and pulled off a 2-1 upset win.
Two days later, they took their home field to finish the regular season against the Ridgway Demons, still riding off the high of the Telluride win.
“The teams’ energy was high and it was good to see,” says coach Mike Martin. “But, they were a tad over-confidant so we tried to break that down a bit.”
A flurry of emails from league officials circulated the day of the Ridgway game and it was determined that if the Titans beat Ridgway, they would punch their ticket to the post season.
Now, the question for the Titans coaching staff was, do they tell the team before the game?
“We avoided telling them the ramifications of the game because we wanted them to be focused on the game at hand and not the game that could be,” says Martin.
Crested Butte took the field wanting to give their fans and themselves one last end-of-the-season treat and exact revenge against the Demon team that beat Crested Butte earlier this season.
The Titans pounded away at the Ridgway net for most of the first half but the Demon defense is nothing if not tenacious and they held off a succession of Titan attacks.
Thirty-five minutes into the game, the Titans were dealt a serious blow when Ridgway capitalized on a quick counter-attack and scored to take a 1-0 lead.
Still, the coaches kept the info from the Titans at halftime, focusing instead on the game plan for the second half.
“There was no sense of panic,” says Martin. “It was time to buckle down and put the game away. There was a sense of confidence in our ability.”
The Demons gained strength from their lead and pushed the pace on the Titans but cooler heads prevailed as the Titans defense held strong.
After spending most of the game trying to build a possession-oriented offensive attack, the Titans turned, once again, to pure hustle to drive the pace.
Crested Butte scored the equalizer in the 60th minute when senior Luis Aguirre received a pass from the midfield and dished the ball 10 yards square to senior Collin Dill. Dill gained a step on his defender and cranked a shot from 20 yards out into the far upper corner, tying the game 1-1.
The Titans took back the game for the next ten minutes before Ridgway mounted one last attack in the final five. But both teams held tight on defense and the game would stretch into extended play.
Just as the Titans were gearing up for overtime, the coaches decided it was time and handed the team the news.
“Win and you’re in,” they told the team.
“The call was made to tell them because we didn’t want them going out there and not giving it everything they had,” says Martin.
While the first five-minute overtime was a flurry of missed passes and nervous running, Aguirre and junior Jesse Reeves took matters into their own hands in the first 30 seconds of the second overtime.
The Titans defense cleared the ball and Aguirre settled the clearing pass just past the midfield line.
As he turned with the ball, Reeves sprinted by taking the ball off Aguirre’s foot and dribbling straight to net to beat the Demon goalie for the game-winning strike, earning the Titans their first trip to the state tournament in four years.
“It was phenomenal,” says Martin. “It was something I hadn’t seen in the years I’ve been coaching. They had two hard games and they came out and played with intensity in both.”
The Titans are headed to the big city this week for the first round of the state soccer tournament. They go in the 20th seed out of 32 teams and will face Front Range perennial soccer powerhouse Colorado Academy.
“We’re just going to take it one game at a time,” says Martin. “It’s all we can do. We want to try to show the state we have something.”