The Miners secured their spot in the 4A finals Monday with a 2-1 victory over the Stansbury Stallions.
They will now face the 18-1 Green Canyon Wolves from Logan for the state title Friday.
Anthony DiCicco is in his second year as head coach of the Park City High girls soccer team, which holds a 17-2 record heading into the final.
He said a state championship has been the team’s goal since preseason.
“We viewed where we are now, and winning on Friday as part of our vision,” DiCicco said. “We want to be playing for championships, we want to be playing for region titles. But we create that vision, and then we work backwards to develop a process that is designed to help us to get better every single day. And one of the things that is a mantra of ours is we want to be playing our best soccer in October.”
The Park City High girls soccer team has won five state championships, with the most recent title in 2005. DiCicco and the team hope to bring the school its sixth state win with a focus on ball possession and a strong back line.
“Our objective is to control games,” the coach said. “We have a strong emphasis on being solid defensively, but part of that is being in control through our sustained possession, and then as we enter the attacking third we want to be dynamic in and around the box. And we’ve done that, we’ve scored around 75 goals this season. So we have a lot of firepower, a lot of different players that can score, but we also want to make sure we’re very difficult to break down and score against.”
The team is captained by seniors Remy Rogers and Kendall Hassel. Hassel’s “Olimpico” goal off a corner kick in double overtime secured the Miners’ victory in the semifinal over Stansbury.
“We’ve got some tremendous senior leadership in Remy Rogers and Kendall Hassel," DiCicco said. "We have two juniors up top who are our two leading goal scorers in Lauren Kindt and Abby Hanton. And then we’ve got freshman Hailey Olson, who’s scored three goals in our last three games.”
The match kicks off at 2 p.m. at America First Field in Sandy, the home of Real Salt Lake. The game will be streamed on KSL Sports. A link to the streaming page can be found here.
