In the last four years, Perryville and St. Vincent, a Catholic school in Perryville, have taken turns winning the league championship. The Pirates went 6-0 and outscored their conference opponents 37-1 to win the league this season.
Perryville fell to Cape Girardeau Notre Dame on May 14 in the Class 2 District 1 championship.
St. Vincent went 5-1 in league play and lost 2-1 on penalty kicks to Duchesne on May 30 in the Class 1 state final.
St. Pius was a Class 2 team in 2018, but moved down to Class 1 this year and joined St. Vincent in District 1.
Perryville head coach Jerry Fulton was selected as coach of the year in the JCAA, and Pirates freshman forward Leah Buerck was named the player of the year after amassing 39 goals and 103 points.
After the regular season ends, the two teams from Perryville take their own playoff routes, while De Soto, Festus, Hillsboro and Windsor have made up Class 3 District 2 since 2017. The Hawks won that district in 2017 and 2018, but the Owls claimed the title this spring with a 1-0 win over Hillsboro.
In that game, Jordan Kolinski scored the game’s only goal and for the second straight season was picked for the conference’s first team.
Kolinski split time between midfield and forward at the beginning of the season, but by the end of the year she was almost exclusively Windsor’s center forward. She led the team with 16 goals and 38 points. She scored five game-winning goals for the Owls, who finished 11-13 after falling 2-1 to Cape Girardeau Central in the sectionals.
“She is very good at receiving the ball and making good passes,” Windsor head coach Mike Hutchison said. “She gets open in the penalty area and doesn’t miss very often on shot opportunities.”
Maddie Gillick was Windsor’s second-leading scorer with 14 goals and 34 points from center midfield. In the final game before the district tournament, Gillick and Kolinski each notched hat tricks (three goals in one game) in an 8-1 victory over Festus.
“She did a great job of dictating the way the opponent had to play her,” Hutchison said. “She expanded her offense without sacrificing anything defensively. She has become a very good two-way player.”
Abby Schacht was selected to the league’s first team all four years she played at Hillsboro. Schacht, the daughter of Chris Schacht, the Hillsboro boys and girls head coach, leaves the Hawks (4-2 conference, 14-8-1 overall) as their all-time leading scorer with 180 points on 71 goals and 38 assists. Schacht, who normally played in the midfield, set the school record for goals in a season in 2018 with 31.
Abby Schacht will attend McKendree University in Lebanon, Ill., this fall and continue her soccer career.
“Through the last four years I’ve always had to hide some of the excitement I felt for her being her dad and a coach at the same time,” Chris Schacht said. “I think she deserves all the accolades that she has gotten over the years. The great part about those are that the coaches we play against are the ones that vote her onto those teams since we cannot vote for our own players.”
Chris Schacht said first team back Raechel Hamilton is one of the best central defenders in team history. Hamilton produced four goals and marked the opposition’s best forwards. This is her second straight year on the first team. She’ll play this fall at Jefferson College.
“I think her style of play is designed for the next level,” Chris Schacht said.
Claire Werner was one of two seniors on Festus (1-5, 2-15) this season. Over her four-year varsity career, Werner started more than 80 games, mainly in the central midfield.
Werner was a solid two-way player and is a great finisher when given the opportunity. She ended her high school career with 30 goals and 10 assists and played an integral part in bringing the Tigers their first district championship in 2016.
“Claire was a good leader and helped to keep the team loose throughout the ups and downs of the season,” Festus head coach Drew Clinton said. “Claire is a strong player on the field, but maybe an even stronger student and a great example of what it means to be a student-athlete. Claire has left a lasting impression on the program and will be greatly missed.”
De Soto lost its first 13 games, went on a three-game winning streak, and closed the season with three defeats and a 3-16-2 mark overall. The Dragons were winless in conference play.
Junior Amy Reiser was the Dragons’ leader and played center midfield at the start of the season but ended up as the striker. Reiser finished the season a first-team pick after completing another consistent year.
Reiser is one of the only players on De Soto who has any club soccer experience. She played club soccer starting at 8 years old through the eighth grade before dedicating her time to volleyball and soccer in high school.
“It does not matter what position I place her in, she is a stable player who will give 110 percent and control the ball as well as the game for De Soto,” said head coach Nate Reiser, who is Amy’s father.
Amy Reiser, whose strength is in distributing the ball to her teammates, finished the season with one goal and three assists.
“This is a great honor for a young lady who has been a leader for the Dragons for three years,” Nate Reiser said.
For the second year in a row, St. Pius’ Jordyn Spreck was named the league’s first-team goalkeeper. The recent graduate will ride that success to the University of North Alabama in Florence this fall.
The Lancers were 8-12-1 and 3-3 in the conference and were shut out eight times this year. On many occasions, Spreck kept St. Pius within range of a victory with her stellar play in the net. This spring, she played all 1,600 of the Lancers’ minutes and posted a 2.20 goals-against average after allowing 2.18 per game in 2018.
“She’s a level above everybody in the conference,” St. Pius head coach Aaron Portell said. “She’s that good. Her goals-against wasn’t the best, but that was the players in front of her breaking down. She kept us in ball games and has awareness and is an intelligent player.”
Three-sport (softball, basketball, soccer) athete A.J. Agers completed her sophomore season with her second appearance on the first team for the Lancers. Agers followed a 9-goal campaign as a freshman with 13 goals in 2019. She played striker at the beginning of this season before moving to the backfield to fill in for injured teammates.
Despite her prowess on the pitch, Portell said Agers’ future in college is on the softball diamond.
“She’s a great finisher. When Molly Flanagan got hurt, we moved A.J. back to defense and she made that position much better.
“A lot of (her goals) was determination. She had some game-winning goals with extra effort. She’s great off of dead balls. She probably scored three goals off that. She’s extremely athletic.”
Portell will be the head coach of three varsity sports (boys soccer, girls basketball, girls soccer) for the 2019-2020 school year. Portell was the assistant to Steve Smith for the boys soccer team until the two coaches swapped jobs this spring.
“As far as time goes, there’s no more time involved,” he said. “Maybe the stress of being the boys head coach instead of the assistant (will be more challenging). It’s going to be hard to replace Steve because of his knowledge of the game. He’s got a young family and he was missing out on important parts of his life.”