Edison boys’ soccer edged by El Toro in PK’s of Hawks Invitational final
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LAGUNA HILLS — Edison’s powerhouse boys’ soccer team returns to the Sunset League wars from an insightful, somewhat gratifying, ultimately disappointing finish to a dominant run through most of Laguna Hills’ end-of-2025 tournament.
Nice timing. The Chargers, their unbeaten start intact and on a seven-plus-game, 542-minute shutout streak, have home showdowns next week against the teams sitting alongside them atop the Sunset League standings. They arrive with confidence, if no trophy.
Edison (9-0-2), winner of its first four tournament games by an 18-0 count, wasn’t the better team in Wednesday morning’s rain-soaked Hawks Invitational title match but battled on even terms until the final boot of the penalty-kick shootout with a deep, veteran foe carrying high expectations.
El Toro (11-1-3), also known as the Chargers, is the toughest side Edison coach Charlie Breneman’s group has encountered, and the test offered fuel and encouragement for what’s to come, but no reward. The seven-round tiebreaker after a scoreless draw did not go Edison’s way.
“I was wondering, like, how would we do against a good opposition like this?” said junior midfielder Dylan Petruolo, the Edison’s most impactful attacking player. “I know some of our games, we play poor opposition. We do good against them. I’m impressed against them, but against an opposition like this, it’s always going to be hard.
“I’m proud of the boys. We put up a good fight. ... We took it all the way to the end.”
Edison’s chief figure was junior goalkeeper Brendan Bingman, who made eight saves during the game — at least two of them “game-changing,” as Breneman put it — and two more during penalty kicks, one to keep it alive after the mandatory five rounds. He was adept off his line, brave in the aerial fights, precise when challenged, and repeatedly defused an El Toro attack that had far more of the ball and a significant territorial advantage and created nearly a dozen genuine chances.
There’s no penalties if Bingman, two minutes apart early in the second half, doesn’t leap to tip Maverick Roney’s rebound header over the crossbar — following a nice save on Gianluca D’Amato’s rocketed free kick from atop the box — nor dives to the right post to deny D’Amato’s crafty header from a corner kick.
“He kept us in the game,” said Breneman, who last season guided Edison to the CIF Southern Section Division 2 semifinals. “If he can do that for us going down the stretch here in league, we’re going to be tough to beat.”
The second one, Petruolo could have sworn, was in the net.
“Bing was amazing,” he said. “I thought that one went in, to be honest. I turn around, ‘Oh, we’re screwed,’ and he stands up, the ball in his hands. I’m so impressed by him. He’s so good.”
Bingman stopped the Klepacki twins in the 5-4 shootout — Jacob on the second round of kicks, Luke on a would-be winner in the fifth, both too far inside — but El Toro prevailed in the seventh round as goalkeeper Jackson Richardson leapt to swat away Jaiden Ramos’ shot headed inside the right post and Troy Tedtaotao followed with the winner.
Bingman said his “two stops were relatively close to me, mostly just bad PK’s” and that he was under no pressure.
“[When the other team converts], it’s ‘whatever,’ ” he said. “I’m not even worried about it. There’s zero pressure on the keeper. [The shooter is] supposed to score that 90% of the time.”
El Toro had more of the ball, was dominant in midfield and created more chances — nearly a dozen to just two, neither well-taken, for Edison — in a gritty game informed by nearly constant, at times heavy rain and the tight confines of Laguna Hills’ tight stadium field.
El Toro’s facility with the ball, in contrast to Edison’s difficulty in connecting through midfield, might have forged more but for a senior back line, anchored by center backs Nathan Theoret and Blake Colby and without influential left back Kendrick Taylor following a first-half head injury, that thwarted penetration, at times in desperation.
Neither team prospered from the tight confines of Laguna Hills’ football-stadium field. Edison at home thrives on Orange County’s biggest pitch — the customary 120 yards long, but 75 rather than 60 yards wide — using its pace to exploit gaping space behind opposing defenses. El Toro from a 3-4-1-2 formation uses wing backs Hutchinson Whitko and Quinn Wood to spread the field and feed Cal State Fullerton-bound D’Amato, who has 15 goals.
The compression led to 34 fouls in a tightly-called game. It wasn’t pretty.
“It was always going to be a tight final,”Breneman said. “It kind of worked out the way I thought it would. Like, one-goal game, maybe get to PK’s. That’s a really good team over there, [and] it was a good final. I’m really proud of my team. They worked hard.
“That’s the way a final’s going to be. It’s going to be tight and kind of nervy. And not a lot of good soccer.”
It leads into what might be the most important week of the Sunset campaign. Edison, which won its first three league games before the holiday break, faces Huntington Beach (5-0-3 overall, 3-0 in the Sunset League) on Wednesday and Newport Harbor (5-2-1, 3-1) next Friday. The Oilers visit the Sailors and Edison plays at Marina (2-7-1, 1-2) when league play resumes Saturday.
“We got a little chink in the armor, where we weren’t clean today,” Breneman said. “And we have a little motivation to go at league next week and get back to the way we were playing before.”
