MANCHESTER – On a frigid Monday evening and in the dimness of semi-functioning lights, SLUH defeated Ladue 2-1 to win the Class 4 District 2 championship in a high-level soccer game that should have been more visible in many ways.
SLUH (23-3-2) will face District 1 winner Vianney (10-12-2) in a Class 4 Missouri State High School Activities Association quarterfinal Saturday, Nov. 15 at a time to be determined.
SLUH, the defending Class 4 champion, and Ladue (22-5), the defending Class 3 champion, exchanged weeks as the No. 1 ranked team in the state throughout the season.
“The travesty is that there’s no reason this game should be a district championship game,” Ladue coach David Aronberg said. “These two teams, with the seasons we’ve had, could have been in two different districts and both had a shot at winning a district title. Then, we could meet later on in the playoffs and let the chips fall as they may.“
Parkway West, the No. 3 seed in the district, finished the season with a 21-4 record. In the three other Class 4 districts in the St. Louis region, only Fort Zumwalt West (18-3-2) has more than 17 wins and fewer than five losses.
“MSHSAA is doing a disservice. You are not being fair to the student-athletes by how you’re setting up the playoff bracket. There’s an easy way to do it – seed the region,” Aronberg said.
Instead of playing at Soccer Park on the final weekend of the season as a showcase of Missouri high school soccer at its best, the two, 22-win, defending state champions played at Parkway South’s football stadium with portions of the field barely lit.
Four days earlier, a blown fuse in the stadium lights forced the Ladue-Parkway West semifinal to be postponed until the following day due to darkness. Several bulbs were not functioning Monday.
SLUH opened the scoring in the 15th minute when Henry Sanders launched a free kick from near the sideline that pinballed to Andrew Wolf in the box.
“Henry served it in, the ball dropped down right in front of me, and I did what I know how to do,” Wolf said. “We wanted to have a good start, so it was nice to fulfill that goal.”
To score a goal off a set piece was a welcomed surprise for SLUH.
“We work on restarts, but we don’t score a lot of goals on restarts,” SLUH coach Bob O’Connell said. “When you play a team as good as Ladue, it’s hard to score goals. We’re not a team that scores a lot of goals in general, so to get the first one off a restart was a win for us.”
Ladue came close to tying the score late in the first half when senior Jordan Oiknine found a crease through the center of the SLUH defense and unleashed a laser that chimed the crossbar in the 32nd minute.
At halftime, Aronberg implored his team to keep it a 1-0 deficit until the next golden opportunity arose.
“I said, ‘We can’t let them score in the first 10 minutes,’” Aronberg recalled.
SLUH only needed two.
A beautiful through ball from senior Barrett Urban sent Paddy Byrne into the clear, and his shot into the far corner of the net gave SLUH a seemingly insurmountable 2-0 lead early in the second half.
“A lesser team could have folded,” Aronberg said. “That could have turned into a 4-0, 5-0 game, and I thought our kids responded as they have all year.”
Ladue quickly began to tilt the field in its favor, and midway through the second half, the Rams were rewarded. The smaller dimensions of the field allowed Andy Schulte to launch a throw-in that landed in the center of the box, where Foster Lloyd found it and booted it into the net to slice the deficit to 2-1.
The final 15 minutes became a flurry of intense, physical, high-skilled soccer played at a level worthy of a final four setting.
A Ladue penalty in the box resulted in a Henry Sanders PK attempt that would have iced the game, but Rams’ goalie Seaton Thompson made a diving save to keep the deficit at 2-1. Moments later, a corner kick delivery from Ladue junior Eliot Allen found the head of junior Jared Snyder, but his shot drifted inches wide of the goal.
“That’s soccer sometimes,” Aronberg said. “I thought we actually created more chances than them, we just couldn’t finish.”
In a furious final eight minutes, Ladue pressed with everything they had while SLUH displayed its signature, impenetrable defense.
“Big props to our back line. They’ve been steady all year, and they really showed up today,” Wolf said.
The 2-1 final score meant that all seven games played during the Class 4 District 2 tournament were decided by a one-goal margin.
“It’s the obvious storyline in this district,” O’Connell said. “When we saw the district pairings and saw that Ladue moved up (to Class 4), we knew it was going to be a really hard district, and it was.”
Things will continue to be difficult for SLUH in the state quarterfinal round. Vianney, the team Ladue defeated for the Class 3 title last season, also moved up to Class 4. The Metro Catholic Conference rival is 2-0-2 in the last four meetings with the Jr. Bills, including a 3-2 victory on Oct. 25 – the only time SLUH surrendered three goals this season.
“They’ve been a tough opponent for us,” Wolf said. “They’re tough physically and they just keep hanging around. We have to match their physically and we can’t stop running, can’t stop working.”
Throughout the season and during the postseason, O’Connell has spoken the message of Duke women’s basketball coach Kara Lawson as a way for his team to embrace difficult situations.
“She says, ‘Don’t wish for easy things. Once you do difficult things, you get better at handling hard,’ and our kids have bought in to that,” O’Connell said.
He added, “They give me everything they’ve got. It’s a really special group.”
A photo gallery from this game can be found at: https://benvessa.smugmug.com/Boys-Soccer/Boys-Soccer-2025/SLUH-vs-Ladue-C4D2-championship