No. 2 Northern Highlands tops Moorestown wins Group 3 title by Brandon Gould of NJ Advance Media for nj.com
This was a moment that Northern Highlands missed.
The Bergen County squad fell short of the Group 3 final a year ago and that wasn’t going to happen again. No team has been to more state title games in the last decade, but every trip is special and Northern Highlands wanted back on the championship stage.
This one was unique in its own right as Northern Highlands, No. 2 in the NJ.com Top 20, beat Moorestown, 1-0, and won its first outright state title since 2014. It was the perfect sendoff for a senior class that has been one of the most dominant groups in state history, but lacked the hardware to emphatically prove it.
That’s not an issue anymore.
“This feels great. We didn’t get the outcome we wanted in the state finals our freshman year and then our sophomore year was bittersweet when we tied Wall,” said senior keeper Sara Ghorashi. “We have a core group of seniors and we wanted to come out and win a title. We made a statement tonight and this says a lot about the standard of this program. We have high expectations and we have high intensity and it’s just a great to be a part of all of this.”
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Northern Highlands has been to eight Group 3 finals in the last 10 years.
The Highlanders have walked away with the trophy seven times now in that span. However, in the past three years, Northern Highlands has lost in the semis, lost in the final and shared a championship after a scoreless tie.
This year’s seniors are 85-4-4 since they joined the program.
That class had yet to win a title all to itself though.
They wanted to leave with one of their own. And now they finally have it.
“We talked yesterday and again today in the locker room about how no one on this roster had ever experienced an outright title,” said Northern Highlands coach Tara Madigan. “That was a motivating factor going into this game. This senior group has been with us for four years and most of them have been up with us every year. It’s a special group and every one of our nine seniors played a role in us getting here.”
Northern Highlands went up in the 16th minute on Sunday at Kean University when sophomore Reagan Klarmann scored off a corner kick sent in by senior Claudia Dipasupil. The Highlanders have been playing in tight games all season, so getting the edge early was a huge sigh of relief for a team that needed overtime to beat No. 13 Middletown North in the semis.
“We have been practicing corners and we needed to finish one and we finally, finally got it done in the biggest game,” said Klarmann. “At halftime, we talked about just keeping up our play and we knew it wasn’t over. We needed to keep that lead and we just motivated ourselves to be better and to finish it out.”
That goal proved to be more than enough.
The Highlanders defense didn’t give up a goal the entire postseason and ended the year with 16 clean sheets overall. Northern Highlands won six games by the score of 1-0, and the last one was the sweetest.
There was an edge-of-your-seat moment in the final minute, but Allie Hite made the stop and sealed the game for Northern Highlands.
The junior is part of a back line that also features senior, Olivia Homan, junior Grace Smiechowski and sophomore Carolyn Weinberger. That defensive unit allowed nine goals all season and was impossible to score on during the run to the Group 3 championship.
Northern Highlands is a powerhouse. No one can debate that.
A double overtime loss to Ramapo in the regular season was the only blemish on this team’s record in 2018 and that result is the only thing separating Northern Highlands from a mythical national championship.
That’s fine with the Highlanders.
They won the only title they care about on Sunday night.
And now Dipasupil, Ghorashi, Homan, Chloe Levy, Claudia Mischler, Katie Murray, Elizabeth Peebles, Whitney Hintz and Olivia Witzmann are walking off with a championship backdrop.
“It went all the way down to the last minute, where Allie Hite has to make a huge play in the last 30 seconds, but this just goes to show how strong this team has been defensively all year,” said Madigan. “We gave up nine goals all year and then to have a shutout in the sectional final, a shutout in the state semifinals and a shutout in the Group 3 final, it says something about the defensive mindset of this team and defense wins championships.
“We’re so proud of these girls.”