Panthers edge Surry

“We outplayed them tonight,” one coach said.

“We overlooked them,” said the other.

Sometimes interpreting coachspeak can be an awfully confusing proposition.

Hibriten beat Surry Central 2-0 Saturday night to advance to the third round of the North Carolina 2-A soccer playoffs in a game where the winning coach left disappointed and the losing coach left excited. Panthers Kayla Stamey and Hallie Hilliard scored the game's only goals.

“We were lucky to get by this game,” Hibriten coach Shea Bridges said afterward. “We got into playing kickball instead of playing soccer. We left the fundamentals at home.”

In its first playoff game of the season (after a first-round bye), Bridges felt that the effort wasn't worthy of the Catawba Valley Athletic Conference's No. 1 2-A seed. His players seemed to agree.

“We just kind of glided by,” Stamey said.

“We definitely could have played better,” Hilliard admitted.

The game was scoreless for more than thirty minutes before Stamey booted a Hilliard cross into the back of the net for what Bridges dubbed “the best goal of the season.”

Hilliard scored 13 minutes into the second half on a left footer that scooted up into the air off her defender. Even a playoff win, however, wasn't enough to erase the sting of a less-than-stellar performance.

“I'm happy that we scored the two goals. That's nice and I'm proud of the girls for that,” Bridges said. “But we can't play that way in the next round and expect to come out the victors.”

Meanwhile, Surry coach Blake Roth was pleased with the way his team fought, especially considering it was its first playoff appearance.

“We played better than them tonight, in my opinion,” he said. “That's not to take anything away from Hibriten - they are a great team. But I thought it was ours to win.”

The Panthers will face Forbush in third-round action. The winner of the Mountain Valley Conference, Forbush is the other No. 1 seed out of the 2-A. They are ranked among the top five teams in the state.

“They have a stout, stout team,” Bridges says. “They didn't get that ranking for nothing. If we don't show up as a better team than the one we were today, we're going to be packing our bags.”

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