Last season Xavier won its record-setting fifth straight state championship in girls soccer and ended the season ranked 17th in the nation by ESPN Rise.
Even though the Saints move up to class 2A as girls soccer is expanded to three classes this year, the Saints have no plans to back down.
“For us it just means we are going to have to push ourselves, we are going to have to be able to step it up. When it comes to state we are going to have to play teams like Bettendorf,” said junior Annie Dale.
The Saints will have a solid foundation to build off this season as they return every player from a suffocating defense that allowed only eight goals in 22 games last season.
“We are extremely strong in the back,” said Coach Doug Graham. “Tori Shepard is a very good keeper, and between her and our backs, Mary Levett, Lucy Martin, Lizzy McWhinney, Kelsie Sargent and Sammi Shepard, they are hard to score on.”
The Saints lost two players in the mid-field and first-team all-state forward Katherine Mettenburg, and will have to find a way to replace them in order to maintain an offense that scored 101 goals last season.
“[Colleen] Bouchard was a big part of our mid-field, we all connected through her and Kat [Mettenburg] was a really good forward,” Dale said. “She put in a lot of goals for us. That just means more people are going to have to step up this year, which is kind of a good thing.”
The Saints will be looking to Dale to help lead the offense this season after being named second team all-state as a sophomore last season.
“We have a tremendous player up top in Annie Dale,” Graham said. "She is just unbelievable in the air. She is probably only 5-foot-6, but she has an unbelievable vertical leap and a nose for the ball. She knows where it’s at and she gets there.”
But Dale will not be the only Xavier player attacking the net this season. With so many girls returning, even some that didn’t start got significant playing time and the girls feel like they already know how to play together.
“A lot of people that are playing up top for our team now, we have learned to interact with each other and learned how to connect with each other,” said senior Meagan Konchar.
With that familiarity and experience, the Saints are hoping to kick their offense into an even higher gear than last season with defenders pushing up and more creativity in the attack.
“We were a good offensive team last year, but there is a lot of room for improvement on that," Graham said. “We have the players that can really do it.”
