Missing its best player, Boise girls soccer wins district title on last-minute goal
With her hands covering her face, Kunie Hirai bent over in disappointment, not knowing minutes later that she’d be buried at the bottom of a dog pile.
After missing an open look in the 86th minute, Hirai found the back of the net in the 89th to lift the Boise High girls soccer team to a 1-0 victory over Rocky Mountain in the 5A District Three Tournament championship game Wednesday at Middleton High.
“It was obviously a big letdown when I missed that first one,” Hirai said. “It’d been a tough game physically and mentally, but just to finally get that goal at the end. We all knew that if we worked together it would come, but it was seeming like it was getting closer to the end. But we knew we just had to keep pushing and keep going and it would come.”
The game-winner came with barely a minute to spare.
Hirai faced up the goal, hesitated to her right and then crossed a shot to her left past the outstretched feet of two Rocky Mountain defenders, tucking the ball just inside the far post.
“She is a big-time player that scores big-time goals. So even at halftime, we talked about the fact that it’s coming. She knew it was coming, it was just a matter of when,” Boise coach Nicole Arsenault said. “The depth of her character to be able to go from missing to not even a few minutes later getting the game-winning goal just shows how good she is as a player and how good she is as a teammate.
“Because somebody else could have just shut down and buried their head and been ineffective for the rest of the game. But that wasn’t good enough for her.”
Wednesday’s district title was Boise’s third in the past five seasons, but it didn’t come without an unprecedented team effort. The Brave took the pitch without their best player, Sammy Smith, who is currently playing with the U.S. national team at the U-17 Women’s World Cup in India.
Boise played the final two games of the regular season without Smith and won’t have her back for the state tournament.
“We just have to make sure that we know our own abilities,” Hirai said. “While we miss Sammy a ton, we have talent on the team and we have more than just one player. ... If we all work together, we’re more than capable of anything.”
Boise (16-1-0) will be the No. 2 seed at state behind No. 1 and defending state champion Lake City. Rocky Mountain (14-4-0) will be the No. 3 seed. Play begins next Thursday at Bonneville High in Idaho Falls, and pairings will be determined after Saturday’s play-in games.
“I think for us it was less about the district championship and more about proving to ourselves that we were the team to beat,” Arsenault said. “We beat Rocky early in preseason and there was talk about the field was too small and the grass was too bumpy. And then the last week of the season, the first game without Sammy, we struggled a little bit to find our identity and so we dropped that game 2-nothing (to Rocky).
“So I think more than it being the district championship, they embraced the game as proving it to themselves that they could put all of the things together — defending, possession and scoring goals.”
This story was originally published October 12, 2022 at 10:45 PM.
