Orono girls’ soccer player Carly Hewitt still is glowing from her team’s shootout victory over Minneapolis Washburn in the Class 1A state championship.

“We’d been planning on it all year, but for it to actually happen,’’ she said, “I don’t believe it.”

The senior cites her team’s calm, confident approach as the key to its success. Still, Hewitt did a little extra.

“A couple days before the quarterfinal, I went up to my local field and just spent about an hour there taking shots and whatnot by myself,” Hewitt said. “I just wanted everything to be perfect; I didn’t want to miss anything.”

She already had scored three goals in section play. Hewitt also scored in both the quarterfinal and semifinal games of the state tournament.

She talked about the Spartans’ winning season:

 

Q: At the beginning of the season could you have imagined that you were going to win state?

A: We knew that Carly Goehring and Sophie Babo were coming back, the Elite Clubs National League players, so we knew that we would have a lot of power up top and that built up our confidence. From the beginning everyone was connecting super well.

 

Q: Did you have any goals set at that point?

A: On the first day of school, we played Benilde [a 1-0 victory]. That was the turning point. From then on we decided, ‘OK, we are going to win state.’ That is our goal. Because they are always our section rivals and they usually take us out.

 

Q: Has it been your goal in the past? Or was this season different?

A: We usually set the same goal and just think OK, whatever. But it really set in when we beat Benilde.

 

Q: What is your leadership role as a senior on the field?

A: I can talk with anyone, any age, and we can talk about anything. There are some seniors on the team who I’ve played with for three years, but Jenna Rakos is a sophomore and Leah Goehring is a freshman. I could really connect well with them, which I think is important because they played a significant role in the state tournament.

 

Q: You lost to Minneapolis Washburn during the regular season. Did that help or hurt in the championship?

A: We just had to calm down, and the next night we focused on communication because that is really what broke us down. We already knew that their forwards were fast, so we needed to really communicate on defense. … It helped us in the end because we knew that we had it in us to beat them.

 

Q: Any other moments that shaped the season for you?

A: Obviously, Sophie getting injured [in the championship game] was important. I was 10 yards away from her. I knew even before she started screaming that something was wrong. That was a major turning point. All throughout the season people are saying ‘Sophie Babo, Sophie Babo.’ That was all they thought of when it came to our team. We all huddled up for about 10 minutes when she was being carted off the field. We decided then that this was our chance to prove to everyone that we could do this without Sophie and that we could bring it home for Sophie and make her proud.

 

Q: If you don’t end up playing in college, what will you carry forward with you from this experience?

A: I’ve learned how to be confident in times of stress. Some of the teams we played, they broke down and started yelling at each other. I think our team was just really calm all the way through. We had a couple times where we realized that we needed to pick it up, but we never yelled at each other because we knew it wouldn’t help us get to our goal. And we were right.

GEORGIA CLOEPFIL