Livonia – Coach Barry Brodsky made it a point to include senior Sarah Zawacki in the photo of CHSL Director of Athletics Vic Michaels handing him the A-B girls soccer championship trophy to Bloomfield Hills Marian.
“She’s a tremendous player and a tremendous person,” said Brodsky. “I wanted to show her how much she’s a part of the team’s play.”
Play is something that Zawacki hasn’t done much this year. She wore her Number 23 for only 10 minutes in the first game of the year when she injured the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee.
She was finished for the season, but that didn’t prevent her from limping around Saturday afternoon – just five weeks after her surgery – encouraging her teammates to an overtime 2-1 victory over a scrappy Ladywood Livonia squad.
It was the Mustangs’ ninth consecutive A-B title. However, Brodsky emphasized another milestone: over the last four years, Marian has won 51 league games without a loss and one tie, the only “blemish” that came earlier this season against, ironically, Ladywood.
“It’s a tribute to the seniors,” he said.
Marian employed its senior power ( 12 seniors make up half of the roster) to frustrate a much younger Ladywood team (only three seniors). Noting the rare (for this Michigan spring) warm temperatures, Brodsky said, “We wanted to get into the other team’s bench, to use it to our advantage”
Senior Martha Stevens gave Marian a 1-0 lead at 29:25 of the second half on a penalty kick from 12 yards out that Blazers goalie, Madeline Reed, had no chance to stop.
Ladywood coach Ken Shingledecker wasn’t happy with the official’s call, but afterward, he said “it’s part of the game,” adding “Marian creates these chances. That’s why they are who they are.”
Twenty minutes later, junior forward Kelly Capoccia tied the score sending a pass from freshman Emily Huddleston across the net into the left corner.
That set the stage for the game-winning heroics by Marian seniors Danielle Mazur and Elizabeth Tresnak 35 seconds into overtime.
“I thought Danielle was going to shoot the ball,” explained Tresnak, “but she got sidetackled. The ball came to me. It was right there.”
“It was a good shot,” said goalie Reid. “I got a hand on it.”
“I was extremely pleased across the board with our effort,” said Shingledecker. “We battled from the go.”
About the nine A-B championships, Brodsky, who has coached Marian for 10 years, said “about 4 or 5" have been close, where the girls “had to gut them out. It hasn’t always been easy.”
Tresnak said the secret to Marian’s success is “that we give each other strength and spirit, but” –and pointing to the coach – “he’s our unifier.”
Zawacki was one of three members of Marian’s walking wounded. Sophomore Sierra DiMaggio, who suffered a posterior cruciate ligament injury to her right knee in the fifth game of the season, and junior Alexa Finger, a torn ligament in her right ankle, concurred that “working as a family” has got the team through “a bit of adversity” during the season marred by a number of other minor injuries.
Zawacki, by the way, expects to sit out a year of soccer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee while she begins rehabbing her injury over the summer.
Marian (13-2-1), ranked No. 1 in Division 2, begins the defense of its state title later this month in a district-level contest against Auburn Hills Avondale.
