Toledo Ottawa Hills is a state champion. The Green Bears beat Doylestown Chippewa 2-1 on Friday afternoon, Nov. 13, at ScottsMiracle-Gro Field in Columbus to win the OHSAA Division V girls soccer state championship, The Daily Record reported. Ottawa Hills finished 18-3-2, while Chippewa, playing in its third straight state final, took its first loss of the season and finished 21-1-1.
Ottawa Hills struck first, around the 20-minute mark of the first half, when midfielder Kendell Skiver received the ball in the central area just outside the box, turned to her right foot and fired over Chippewa goalkeeper Gianna Neely for a 1-0 lead the Green Bears carried into halftime, The Daily Record reported in its coverage of the final.
Chippewa pressed for much of that first half without breaking through. Forwards Delaney Marshall and Emme Donnelly worked the outside channels and put a series of low crosses into the box that were blocked, missed, or arrived without a runner to finish them, The Daily Record reported. The chances were there, but the equalizer was not.
The second half opened the game up. Three minutes after the restart, midfielder Ashleigh Speakman scored to push Ottawa Hills ahead 2-0, The Daily Record reported in its live updates of the match. About nine minutes later, Marshall drove through the middle, took touches to her right and sent in a low cross that forward Aliana Henthorn tapped in, cutting the lead to 2-1 with roughly 25 minutes for Chippewa to chase the game.
The numbers show how close the final was. Chippewa outshot Ottawa Hills 17-10, put more shots on target, 9 to 7, and registered more corner kicks, 6 to 2, while Ottawa Hills held 56 percent of the possession over the full 80 minutes, The Daily Record reported. In the closing minutes the Chipps came close on shots from distance and on corner kicks, but the Green Bears’ back line held and the equalizer never came.
For Chippewa, the loss closed a remarkable three-year run. The Chipps outscored their opponents 403-24 over that span, compiled a 64-5-1 record, and became the sixth girls soccer team in OHSAA history to make three consecutive state title game appearances, The Daily Record reported. Unlike the last two finals, both 3-0 losses to Cincinnati Madeira in which Chippewa did not score, this defeat was one in which it played well enough to leave Columbus as state winners.
“It’s a hard thing to talk about when you just lost a state championship game,” Chippewa head coach Ruth Coney told The Daily Record after the match. Coney, who was inducted into the Wayne County Sports Hall of Fame this summer, told The Daily Record her teams have had very few losses over the last four years with this group, and that the run shows the determination the players brought to the program.
The three Chippewa seniors who sat with Coney at the post-match press conference — Marshall and center backs Paityn Welty and Myra Lewis — summed up their time in the program for The Daily Record. “We just like having fun,” Lewis told The Daily Record. “Obviously, it didn’t end the way we wanted it to, but we did get everything out of this season.” Marshall, the all-time goals leader in Chippewa school history and Wayne County Athletic League history, credited Coney and the program she has built for returning to the final three years running despite losing substantial players along the way, The Daily Record reported.
Both teams arrived in Columbus the hard way. Chippewa reached the final with a 3-0 semifinal win over Berlin Hiland on Nov. 10, while Ottawa Hills advanced past Columbus Academy in a shootout after a 2-2 draw in its semifinal the same day, The Daily Record and The Columbus Dispatch reported. The Green Bears then finished the job on Friday, surviving the state’s most consistent small-school program to take the Division V trophy back to Toledo. State championship weekend in Columbus also produced our coverage of Seton’s Division I girls soccer title won with 49 seconds left and Fenwick’s third state volleyball title.
“We haven’t been down much this season, but there were times in previous years where we have been down and we were able to come back, so them scoring the first two didn’t really put us at a disadvantage because we know what we’re capable of,” Lewis told The Daily Record about trailing for the entire match, a position Chippewa had rarely faced all season.
What happens next is the offseason for both programs. Ottawa Hills returns home with a state championship and an 18-3-2 final record, while Chippewa’s senior class — Marshall, Welty and Lewis among them — departs after three straight trips to the state final, leaving Coney’s program to reload, as Welty put it to The Daily Record, the way it has every season.