EAST LANSING — Spring Lake came up empty in its only Michigan high school girls soccer state finals appearance in 2021.
Three years later, the Lakers’ cup runneth over as they knocked off nine-time MHSAA champion Birmingham Marian with a 1-0 victory Saturday in the Division 2 championship at Michigan State’s DeMartin Field.
Spring Lake (17-2-5) lost, 3-0, to Marian in the 2021 final, but turned the tables in 2024, thanks to freshman forward Aveya Patino’s first-half goal.
Marian (15-4-3), which had posted six straight shutouts en route to the title game, enjoyed a slight advantage in shots attempted (9-8) and took more corner kicks, throw-ins and free kicks.
But the Mustangs couldn’t get a shot past Spring Lake senior goalkeeper Jessica Stewart, who made four saves to post her 11th shutout of the season.
With just under two minutes left, Marian sophomore Lily Robinson launched a free kick nearly 45 yards, but Stewart leaped into the air and snatched the dangerous bid flawlessly with both hands.
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The Lakers then ran out the clock to celebrate their first state championship.
Stewart was a starter as a freshman when the Lakers lost to Marian in the state final. She tore her ACL her sophomore year, but missed only four games. She swam for three years and was the kicker for the Spring Lake football team last fall.
“I remember vividly getting scored on my freshman year,” Stewart said. “It did not feel good. But this year I feel a lot more comfortable being here. We’ve been here before, a lot of us have been here before from freshman year. We feel a lot more comfortable with our game. We knew the game plan going in and we executed it.”
Stewart, wearing a knee brace, credited her defense in pitching the shutout.
“They’re amazing, I love them all so much,” she said. “I feel I haven’t had a lot of time to shine this year because they just stop everything and we’re so comfortable with each other at this point … we just work so well together. They’re great.”
Communication has been the key for the Lakers’ success all year.
“We’ve kind of struggled with it all year and we’ve been pulling that together in the postseason tournament, just to talk a lot and be aggressive because we knew Marian would come out hard,” Stewart said.
Spring Lake coach Becky May said “the maturity of our defense is unparalleled anywhere in the state.”
“The more pressure you can put on them and the more I rely on them to win the game, the better I feel,” she added. “We shut them down and we said, ‘Hey, the game is on your shoulders. You do your job and we’ll find a way.’”
During the first 27 minutes of action, both teams tried to probe each other and experimented to see what worked best for them offensively with Spring Lake holding a 5-4 advantage in shot attempts.
With 15:35 left in the half, Marian’s Clair Dauer sailed a shot that Stewart tipped over the crossbar. Midway through the first half at the 20-minute mark, Spring Lake’s Naomi Force got off a solid shot in the box, but Marian keeper Dani Mertz made the save.
The deadlock was broken with 13:13 left when Patino pounced on a rebound inside the box after the initial attempt by teammate Ava Nardin, who got credit for the assist, to make it 1-0.
“I was kind of just there for Ella’s shot,” Patino said. “I was just trying to get her rebound and I just guess, it was there, it was out there, she just pushed it out there and I put it in the back of the net.”
Patino’s 29th goal of the year proved to be the biggest of her burgeoning Spring Lake career.
“Aveya has been doing it all year, and she’s creative,” May said. “She’s always in front of the net because Andree is just disrupting things constantly with her runs and creative play.”
Meanwhile, it was the first time in seven state playoff games that the Mustangs had allowed a goal.
“It’s just one of those game, dominated possession of the ball and we just made one mistake in our end of the field and it cost us,” Marian first-year coach Danny Price said. “At the same time, we couldn’t go forward. Credit to Spring Lake. They were defensively solid. We just couldn’t get it behind them at times. Their keeper made a couple of good saves and it just wasn’t our day. I could tell with 20 minutes to go we began to tire a bit.”
Marian now has five runner-up finishes to its credit in addition to nine state crowns.
“We graduated four seniors, so we’ve got a big squad of 18 back and we’ve got a loaded freshman group coming through,” said Price, a former English professional who doubles as the Brother Rice boys coach. “We’ll be back, we’ll be stronger than ever. This school is used to adversity. We’ve dealt with it. We’ll be back. That’s three finals in four years for us, so it tells the strength and the size of the program.”
For May, a Spring Lake product and former Michigan State player (1992-93), it was a sweet homecoming in more ways than one.
“This is why it’s important, when I was here and got announced at Michigan State, they announced me from Spring Lake, Michigan, and some girl said, ‘Where in the world is Spring Lake?’” May recalled. “Because no one or anybody outside had heard of us. They’ve heard of us now, very proud.”
And for Spring Lake’s eight seniors, it was redemption from the 2021 setback to Marian.
“They talked about that,” Patino said of the seniors. “They were here two or three years ago and they were ready to beat Marian.”
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