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SANDY — Rowland Hall freshman Lizzie Carlin scored three goals — including two during a 4-0 first half — to help the Winged Lions cruise to their second-straight Class 2A state with a 7-0 thumping of Waterford Saturday at Rio Tinto Stadium.
Sam Carlisle opened the scoring just five minutes into the match, and the long-legged defender set up Carlin for a first-half brace to give Rowland Hall a 3-0 lead after only 15 minutes.
They never looked back, overwhelming a team with which it split the regular-season series in Waterford (13-3-0).
“That was really important,” Carlin said of the fast start. “It really set the mood for the rest of the game, and got us confident in the beginning — and we kept playing strong from there.”
Summer Connery, Sally Logue and Mary Bocock each added a goal for Rowland Hall (14-1), which won back-to-back titles for the first time in school history.
“We’ve gotten off to fast starts in the past,” said Rowland Hall coach Bobby Kennedy, whose team beat Waterford 6-3 in last year’s 2A championship. “But goals change games, so we scored a goal or two, and it put them on their heels a bit.”
Rowland Hall had won trophies in 2007, 2014 and 2017 before Saturday’s rout, leading to a recent run of dominance scarcely seen in Utah high school soccer. The Winged Lions’ four titles overall is tied for the fifth-most in Utah girls soccer history, on par with the likes of Davis, Bountiful and the Mountain View squads of the early 2000s.
“Part of it, honestly, is the classification is a little bit softer after they re-classified the last couple of years,” Kennedy said. “But we have a little bit of a system, they believe in it, and we get players that we can blend together and buy into it. Then you end up producing something like this every once in a while.”
