‘Really meant a lot to us’: Columbus-area soccer teams make most of opportunities

Thursday, August 7, 2025
By Michael Rich
mrichnotwealthy@gmail.com

St. Charles senior Ryan Sullivan, an Ohio State commit, will look to take the Cardinals back to the Division I state finals this season. File photo

An air of calm spread over coach Scott Dempsey as his Watterson girls soccer team prepared for penalty kicks to decide the Division II state championship last fall at Historic Crew Stadium.

“Trust me, we’re either prepared, and we’re going to succeed, or we’re not prepared well enough, and we’re not,” Dempsey said. “But yeah, it was not the way that we hoped it would end or expected it to end. But I’m glad that we were as well prepared as we were, for sure.”

The Eagles converted three penalty kicks to notch a 2-1 victory over North Royalton for the program’s first state championship, capping a 20-2 campaign.

It was the culmination of a season of change in soccer. The OHSAA announced divisional expansions in February 2024 in several sports, including soccer, which went from three divisions to five in both boys and girls.

The New Albany boys team, which finished 19-1-1, won in Division II for the program’s first state title. St. Charles (Division I), DeSales (Division III) and Worthington Christian (Division IV) boys and Worthington Christian (Division IV) girls also made the state tournament.

Watterson was knocking at the door for several years in Division I, where it appeared in the regional tournament in 2020 and 2021 and advanced to the state tournament in 2018.

“I think it’s just really good to allow more teams to have more success with adding divisions,” said Emma Miller, a senior and Queens University of Charlotte commit, who scored on one of the penalty kicks for the Eagles in the final. “I think it really helped to kind of spread out the talent kind of and allow teams to be more successful.

“The amount of work that we put in was just so rewarding. We still had really good success in the Division I tournaments. But, yeah, I think getting the state title was really reassuring to us. I think it (was) just all our hard work (that) paid off. And to bring the first title home to Watterson really meant a lot to all of us.”

That opportunity was clear. Two teams in Division I and one each in Divisions II, III, IV and V had a chance to make the girls state tournament as opposed to one team in each of the three divisions in 2023. The boys tournament could have had two teams each in Divisions I, II and IV and one each in Divisions III and V as opposed to one in each of the three divisions in 2023.

The sectional tournament was largely eliminated, meaning there were fewer games and fewer home games for the better seeds and more travel. In some cases, a program could slot itself in a district final match, meaning it wouldn’t have to win to receive a runner-up trophy.

Losing the sectional rounds put a gap in the schedule at the end of the regular season. St. Charles coach Chris Vonau happened to schedule his regular-season finale on Oct. 12, four days before the beginning of the newly formatted tournament. The trade-off for the Cardinals was an 11-day gap between that match and their penultimate game.

“Certainly, I think people are just naturally averse to change, but welcomed it after we understood it,” St. Charles coach Chris Vonau said. “I know some teams that expressed that they had to rearrange their scrimmage schedule so that they could have an exhibition after their last regular season game because they didn’t want their guys sitting around for three weeks.”

The pacing of the tournament was a little bit different, too. Instead of both rounds of the sectional, district, regional and state tournaments taking place in the same week – there were larger gaps between rounds.

“Obviously, it’s a little bit different, but I don’t think it really played that much of a role on (our) preparation or anything,” said St. Charles senior and Ohio State commit Ryan Sullivan. “It was nice having sometimes a full week of preparation to be able to prepare for (those) bigger games and be able to rest more in between games.”

The Cardinals went 14-4-4 overall last season, finishing as state runners-up in Division I after falling 1-0 to Cleveland St. Ignatius in the final second of the second overtime. The Cardinals were originally slated to compete in Division II in the new format, but lobbied successfully to move to Division I.

Does more opportunity water down the achievement of winning a state title for everybody outside of Division I?

“If you look at the Division II roster of teams, those teams were all Division I the previous 20 years, right? So, it’s not like it was, you know, they’re from Mars,” New Albany boys coach Johnny Ulry said. “From a central Ohio standpoint, you had Westerville Central, Thomas Worthington, Dublin Scioto and New Albany – you still got all these programs that were in Division I and had success in Division I – especially in central Ohio.”

New Albany faces a new challenge ahead when the season begins around the state on Aug. 15.

“It’s finding new ways to keep them hungry and motivated and to keep their hunger they had last year,” Ulry said. “And that’s something that us coaches are working on ourselves – that we got to keep ourselves motivated. Then, if we’re able to do that as coaches, then hopefully it’ll bleed into our players.”