Girls’ Soccer: Edison edges Los Al

Edison High girls’ soccer coach Kerry Crooks was in tears.

So was virtually every Charger player.

But as the cliché goes, these were tears of joy.

Seconds before the crying and the hugging and the elation commenced on the Edison soccer field, Taylor Wasserman scored a goal in the final seconds of the second overtime to give the Chargers a 1-0 victory over Sunset League rival Los Alamitos in the final game of the regular season.

With the victory, the senior-laden Chargers (13-7-2, 7-3) clinch the outright league title.

The Griffins (20-4-3, 6-3-1), who had been in first heading into the match, drop into a second-place tie with Huntington Beach. The Oilers defeated Marina, 7-3 on Tuesday.

The winning goal came on a corner kick from Mikayla Edwards that found Wasserman, who used a hard-charging header to send the ball passed Griffins goalie Lindsay Kellogg.

The sequence was nearly identical to a corner kick about a minute earlier, but on that play, Wasserman’s header hit to the top of the goal.

“I told myself this is it,” said Wasserman, who just committed to play at Wagner College in New York in the fall. “I knew where the ball was going and I literally body slammed into it. It hit my shoulder and head and went back to the back of the net.”

Had it not been for the play of Chargers’ goalie Zoe Clevely throughout the match, there may not have even been an overtime.

The Griffins were on the attack and in Edison’s side of the field for most of the first half, but Clevely, who just signed a letter of intent last week to play at Pepperdine, handled every ball that came her way.

In one sequence, the Griffins’ Ally LaCarra Platt came toward the goal on a breakaway.

Clevely left her post to cut off the goal, forcing Soto to shoot wide.

With about three minutes left in the first overtime, Clevely dove to her right to stop a hard kick from Amanda Jones.

“Zoe was a beast,” Crooks said. “She is our leader and she showed it today.”

The victory also snapped the Chargers’ three-game losing streak and Los Alamitos’ three-game winning streak.

“We had a very frustrating season, going from 6-0 and then losing three games in a row,” Wasserman said. “We worked as a team to battle through it and put all that anger and frustration aside and played as a team.”

The Chargers and Griffins played three times this season.

The Griffins defeated the Chargers, 2-1, in the finals of the Aliso Cup on Dec. 12.

Edison came away with a 2-1 victory in their first league match on Feb. 2.