Prep girls’ soccer: Colfax rallies late, tops West Campus in OT championship thriller
The player most excited about Saturday’s championship result at Cosumnes River College was more than 2,000 miles away.
The Colfax High School girls’ soccer team made a Facetime phone call to Taryn Childers, who left the team to move to Tennessee during Christmas break, to tell her the good news. The team huddled around the phone to scream in unison to their former teammate, “We did it!”
After more than 100 grueling minutes, the top-seeded Falcons earned a 3-2 overtime victory over No. 3 West Campus to claim the Sac-Joaquin Section Division V girls’ soccer championship.
“(Taryn) was super excited for us,” said Colfax coach Kara Diederichs. “She Facetimes us a lot at the end of practices. … She’s like my other daughter.”
Chelyn Ackerman’s second goal of the night, three minutes into the overtime period, proved to be the decisive goal. A West Campus foul set up a free kick for Ackerman from 20 yards out, which she blasted into the back of the net, giving Colfax a 3-2 advantage and the program’s second blue banner in school history.
“I was nervous. My heartbeat was racing,” Ackerman confessed. “But I knew we wanted it more, so in the end, I knew that’s what was going to happen.”
Ackerman also netted the game’s first goal 11 minutes into the second half off a feed from freshman Kaia Diederichs. After a scoreless first half, Colfax and West Campus traded goals in the second.
The Warriors responded with a goal from Abbie Harris from 25 yards away at the 22-minute mark of the second half. West Campus then pulled ahead, 2-1, in the 71st minute as Addisyn Barnum evaded her defender and beat the Colfax goalie one-on-one.
But a pair of Colfax seniors stepped up in the clutch. Ella Netemeyer made a cross to Savannah Sheets, who connected on the game-tying goal with approximately a minute left in stoppage time to force overtime.
“She’s always super calm under pressure, so I’m not surprised,” Kara Diederichs said of Sheets. “I knew if we had five more minutes, we could get there. I didn’t know if we could do it in two minutes. There definitely was a momentum shift in the middle of the game that went in their favor, and we felt that. So, for us to come back against that momentum shift was huge. But again, it’s just the character and heart of those girls. They wanted to make school history.”
Colfax needed to make stops at the goal in overtime. Sophomore Anna Miles made two of her eight saves on the night during the OT period.
“Exhilarating,” Miles said. “It was one of the best feelings of accomplishment I’ve ever felt. It was amazing.”
Colfax (19-2) reached the section finals in 2020, but suffered a heartbreaking 4-1 loss to Bradshaw Christian. Eight Falcons remain from that season, avenging that loss when Colfax beat the Pride, 4-0, in this year’s semifinals.
“It’s a classic redemption story,” Ackerman said. “Beating Bradshaw Christian, that game from the start, our confidence and our desire to win, they had no chance. I mean, we crushed them.”
A 1999 Colfax grad, Kara Diederichs returned to teach and coach at her alma mater in 2011. She recently introduced a campus club called the Women’s Athletic Organization, providing support and unification for the female Falcon student-athletes.
“It’s completely brought the culture of female athletes together on campus,” Diederichs said. “They constantly lift one another up, they’re together all day long on campus, just supporting each other. It’s better than I’ve ever seen it. There’s just not that normal divisiveness among teenage girls on our campus because of it.”
Diederichs’ freshman daughter, Kaia, has had a busy winter. Not only has she dominated on the soccer field – her 37 goals are a school record and rank seventh in the nation among freshmen, according to stats reported on MaxPreps – but she is also a key contributor on the Falcons girls’ basketball team, which is also currently in the midst of its own playoff run. She also does her own laundry and gets straight As, her mom says.
“She’s probably the most disciplined teenager I know,” Kara Diederichs said. “She’s been like this since she was a little kid. It’s her life passion. She’s held herself to really high standards, with academics too, and she expects a lot of herself. It’s fun to see it pay off.”
Kaia Diederichs averages 8.9 points and 3.6 rebounds on the hardwood. On days she competes for the soccer and basketball teams on the same day? She ups the ante to 11.3 points, 4.3 rebounds and 4.0 assists on the court and averages a hat trick on the pitch. All the while, Colfax teams have gone 8-0 on those days.
“It’s a lot of help from everyone around me,” Kaia Diederichs said. “They’re always there to support me for everything, and the coaches make everything work. It’s a lot of fun. … We’ve worked so hard for this and it’s so cool to see everything pay off.”
Colfax now awaits seeding for the CIF NorCal tournament, which is set to begin March 1.
This story was originally published February 20, 2022 at 4:58 AM.