South Broward boys stun Doral Academy to reach state soccer semifinals
On Jan. 10, South Broward boys’ soccer coach Lionel Brown took a picture of the scoreboard at Doral Academy. His team had just finished getting routed by the Firebirds 4-0 in a regular-season match.
“I didn’t say anything to them when we left,” Brown said. “I just took a picture. In the event we came back down here again I wanted to have that picture ready. Then I showed it to them [Tuesday] and told them what we were going to do and that was reverse that scoreboard.”
A real nice motivation tool perhaps, but the bottom line was that Brown’s Bulldogs were a huge underdog going into Wednesday night’s Region 4-6A final. After all, Doral was a perfect 20-0-0, the No. 1-ranked team in the state and the No. 2 Max Preps team in the nation
Two hours after the game started, it didn’t matter where anybody was ranked. South Broward stunned the soccer world by shocking Doral 4-1 and made school history, reaching its first state final four.
The Bulldogs (17-4-2) will hit the road on Saturday and travel to Lakeland to take on George Jenkins in a Class 6A state semifinal at 7 p.m.
“Everybody might’ve thought I was crazy, but I had the confidence that these kids could come in here and do this tonight and they did,” Brown said. “That’s because they are a group of incredibly motivated and determined kids and proved that out there on the field tonight.”
Brown watched as his team stunned the Firebirds and their group of overflow fans by scoring just 90 seconds into the game. That when a corner kick from Francisco Contreras bounced around in front of the net. When the Doral goalkeeper couldn’t find the ball, Micheal Gonzalez managed to get a foot on it and knocked it home.
“Getting that first goal was huge,” said Nicholas Robles, who scored two of his team’s four goals. “I sent a message to them [Doral] very quickly that we had shown up to play.
But the Bulldogs were not close to done. At the 24:20 mark of the first half, Robles scored again off a set piece free kick to make it 2-0. Five minutes later, the Doral folks sat in shock as Contreras fired a deep throw-in in front of the net that Felipe Florencio went high with his right foot and drilled it into the back of the net for a 3-0 lead.
After Doral coach Pam McDonald got through with a verbal thrashing of her players at the break, the Firebirds came out with renewed energy. When they scored just two minutes into the second half on a perfectly executed corner kick from Matias Cavallo to Aaron Tamirez, who headed the ball back toward the net where Diego Avalos headed it in, the game was on.
A fired up Doral team then spent the next 30 minutes blitzing the South Broward net and peppering South Broward keeper Josh David Alejo with shot after shot. But Alejo was magnificent, making at least a dozen saves, three of four of the “big-time” variety.
With all Doral players pushing up, Robles scored on a breakaway literally as the clock ran out to complete the scoring.
“The second half was pretty crazy, and I was out there just doing the best I could to protect the net,” Alejo said. “There was definitely a lot of pressure because every ball I saved they kept following up. This is crazy. Nobody in the world thought we could pull this off tonight and we did.”
This story was originally published February 19, 2020 at 9:50 PM.