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Corinth girls soccer program has a landmark season.......... Pages
The Corinth High School 2021-22 girls’ soccer team won two state playoff games and made it to the North Half championship.
Corinth girls soccer program has a landmark season
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Lady Warriors kick their way to north half
By TANNER MARLAR
For Crossroads Magazine
At the start of the 2021-2022 season, Corinth High School girls’ soccer head coach Cameron Glenn had no idea what to expect.
West Lauderdale, who typically runs the state championship on the girl’s side of 4A, was lacking their usual crop of talent. Corinth, however, had one of its most cohesive groups the program had ever seen.
The opportunity was there to make a deep state playoff run, but according to Glenn, that wasn’t the focus.
“I think even a couple of girls on the team said that if you would have told them that they’d be playing for the north half title, they would have kind of just laughed in your face,” said Glenn. “It hadn’t really been a reality for us for a while, just because West Lauderdale is so dominant in girls’ soccer.”
With West Lauderdale out of the picture for at least this season, the door was open to any and all challengers. Coach Glenn and his band of Lady Warriors knew this, but it didn’t hit them until later on in their season.
It was in a game against Caledonia, in which the Lady Warriors lost 2-1 via a last-minute goal from the Caledonia strikers. In the words of coach Glenn, “it was a kind of a heartbreaker.”
However, Corinth soccer fans couldn’t have told it by the attitude of the players. Each one of them held their heads high after that game, knowing full-well that they had just taken an incredibly competitive team that is used to making deep playoff runs down to the wire.
“No one at the end of that game was like ‘wow, that’s the most heartbreaking situation ever,’” said Glenn. “I think everyone was just like ‘alright, well, we expected to come down here and get routed 7-0’, and it could have easily been that way, but we went down there with a tactical game plan and really frustrated them … the huddle after that game, every single one of those girls that were on that field was like ‘I feel good about this. I feel good about what we just did.’”
Once the girls realized they could hang with and play with anybody, the season began taking on a magical form, particularly at the hands of team leaders Belle Mitchell and Emma Hall.
Mitchell, a senior defender, was a vocal on-field leader and team captain. She was part of the glue that held the squad together, according to Glenn, making sure that everything and everyone was in the right place at the right time.
Regan Houston was another vocal leader for the Lady Warriors. Houston unfortunately suffered a torn ACL during the season, but never let that dismay her from pursuing the team’s goals in whatever ways possible. Houston was at every practice and every game, giving halftime speeches and offering her teammates the words of encouragement they needed.
With Houston sidelined, more onfield leadership duty fell to a familiar name in the Warrior fan base, Emma Hall.
Hall was a do-it-all player for CHS – assists, goals, tackles, you name it, and Emma Hall delivered it when it mattered for the Lady Warriors this 2021-22 season.
The Lady Warriors won two games in the state playoffs.
Unfortunately, the Lady Warriors lost in the North Half Championship game, but nonetheless had a landmark season in the history of the program, as evidenced by the number of fans that became involved with the sport during their playoff run.
“You’d just have girls walking up and down the hallway, and they’d come up to me and be like ‘Coach Glenn, everybody is talking about soccer,’ like it’s so cool,” said Glenn, “But I felt like a celebrity walking down the hallway. People stopped me just to talk about soccer.”
That level of fan and community involvement did the girls good, according to Glenn, as it gave them the lift they needed. They knew that not only did they believe in themselves, but the community believed in them, too.
Going forward, Glenn believes that this deep run will bode well for the program, now that the girls know what it takes to reach the upper echelon of their division. Coach Glenn brings an interesting perspective to the issue, though, that may bode well for the team’s future.
“Most coaches may complain about this, but we have to wait until early November to get going even though the state has expanded the season and teams are playing by the third or fourth weekend of October,” said Glenn. “The reason we wait is because all our girls run cross country. I’d say 80 percent of our boys and girls run cross country … and so getting them in that state championship mentality that they have with that program and getting them into our practices and games and bringing that mentality, I just feel like that’s a huge advantage for us.”
For record’s sake, the CHS girls won a ring this past year (2021) in cross country. If the two programs continue to succeed, their success might just depend on one another. 2021-22 Sports Rewind Edition Lady Warrior soccer standouts Emma Hall (left) and Haley Guare celebrate a Corinth state playoff victory.
Corinth High School girls’ soccer head coach
