Ithaca boys soccer wins sectionals, girls named co-champions

With the Section IV soccer season coming to a close, a pair of local teams secured sectional titles—both from the same school.

On October 28, the Ithaca boys and girls soccer teams took on Vestal for their respective Section IV Class AA championships at Waverly Memorial Stadium. The boys team won the title outright with a commanding 5-0 win, while the girls team were named co-champions with a 1-1 tie.

The boys team won its first sectional title since 2018 and its first outright since 2017. It was a special moment for second-year head coach Jonathan Billing, who played in two sectional finals for the Little Red and won once.

“It means a lot to me,” Billing said. “Being an alum, my heart’s here, so I love to see Ithaca moving on and winning the section and just continuing the tradition. It’s been a couple of years since we’ve been there. The joy that the kids had playing in those last couple games and really wearing that Ithaca name just meant a lot to them.”

The star of the show in the final was Iago Lopez. The senior tallied four goals and one assist, helping him end the campaign with a team-high 17 goals and 9 assists. Billing had high praise for Lopez and described what makes him such a threat anywhere on the pitch.

“I think he’s dangerous in lots of ways,” Billing said. “If you ever talk to him, he loves assisting and taking on players. He likes scoring, for sure. But if he can find the last pass to tap in, he’s going to find that pass. I think that makes him kind of a hard player to defend. He will take players on with the dribble. He will slow things down. He’s actually pretty fast when you put the ball over the defense. He’s got multiple ways of getting around players. I think he just has a lot of experience and a lot of tools in his toolbox to just pick apart teams.”

Lopez formed a strong partnership with Oliver Klemm in attack, especially in the postseason. In the semifinal against Union-Endicott, Lopez set up the junior for the opening goal in a 2-0 win. Then in the final, Klemm assisted Lopez for his second goal of the game, and Lopez later returned the favor to make it 3-0.

“I’ve coached him before [in junior varsity], so I knew what he was capable of,” Billing said. “He’s definitely grown since I’ve last had him. He’s continuing to get taller and stronger on the ball. He makes those extra runs and Iago can find him, or vice versa where Iago is making that extra run and Oliver will put the ball out in front of  him. There was a connection there towards the end, and I think everybody saw it, especially in the last couple of games.”

With the sectional triumph, the Little Red advanced to the state tournament and faced off against Section I’s Scarsdale on November 1 in Yorktown, where their spectacular season ended with a 4-2 defeat. After heading into the halftime break down 4-0, two goals from Klemm got Ithaca back in the game, but their comeback bid ultimately fell short.

“Tactically we learned some things that we can make adjustments on,” Billing said. Moving forward, that second half was a little bit of light that we can fight our way back. Just because you go down a couple goals early, or even four goals down in a game, the game’s not over. I think [we had] tenacity, saying we’re gonna play to the last whistle. But I think there’s a lot of things we can learn from playing a better opponent and even losing. For all of our juniors coming back, I think this was a great experience to see some high-level soccer.”

As for the girls soccer team, this season marked a vast improvement from the previous year’s 3-8-2 mark. Overseeing the turnaround was DJ Roberts, who became the new head coach after leading the junior varsity program for two years and the modified team before then.

The Little Red started off the campaign on a roll, winning six of their first seven. They then went on a three-game skid before winning their regular season finale to enter the postseason at 7-4. That earned them the number-three seed in the tournament, where they would first head to Horseheads for the semifinals. The match went all the way to penalty kicks, where the Little Red prevailed 3-1 in the shootout. Freshman goalkeeper Lucy Levine made a key save, while Rumi Blizzard’s spot kick sent the Little Red to the championship.

Blizzard was called into action from the penalty spot again in the final, and she once again converted to put Ithaca up 1-0 against Vestal. The Golden Bears scored late in the match to force overtime, and no scoring there meant another shootout for the Little Red. While they fell in the shootout 5-4 this time around, they still walked away with their heads up high and their first sectional title since 2018 in hand.