STANDING TALL: Hun School boys’ soccer goalie Diego Pena surveys the action in a game earlier this fall. Last Wednesday, senior standout Pena made 12 saves and scored a goal on a penalty kick as second-seeded Hun fell 6-1 at top-seeded Pennington in the Prep A state final. The Raiders finished the fall with a 13-4-2 record. (Photo by Frank Wojciechowski)

By Bill Alden

When the Prep A boys’ soccer final was over last Wednesday, Hun School stars Luciano Verduci and Gonzalo Perez Nunez were lying prone on the ground near the bench, getting treated for some knocks to their legs and spent from running all over the field.

Verduci and Perez Nunez exemplified how hard second-seeded Hun battled as it fell 6-1 at top-seeded Pennington.

Having pushed the Red Hawks hard in a regular season meeting on September 18, losing 3-1 to Pennington after the foes were tied at 1-1 late in the contest, Hun head coach Pat Quirk fine-tuned some tactics for the playoff rematch.

“We thought maybe we could press them a little bit higher,” said Quirk. “We thought we could win the ball in some dangerous spots and I thought we did. We created a bunch of chances early on and didn’t finish.”

Pennington, though, finished their chances in the early going, tallying two goals in the first 10 minutes to jump out to a 2-0 lead.

“They got the first and the second and we put our-selves in a little bit of a hole,” said Quirk.

With 22:28 left in the first half, Hun got on the board as senior goalie Diego Pena scored on a penalty kick to cut the Red Hawks’ lead in half.

“The 2-0 lead is always tough, I thought we had a little momentum going there after that,” said Quirk.

But Pennington responded with two goals in the last 10 minutes of the half to go up 4-1 at intermission.

“The halftime message was, ‘hey keep your heads up, keep grinding and do what we are doing,’” said Quirk. “We weren’t going to abandon the game plan, We wanted to get one and make it a two-goal game with 20 minutes left and we should have a good chance there.”

While the Raiders pressed forward at various points in the second half, they couldn’t narrow the gap and the Red Hawks tacked on two more goals to make it a 6-1 final.

Quirk credited Pena with doing all he could to thwart Pennington.

“He makes a lot of good saves, he keeps us in the game,” said Quirk of Pena, who ended the night with 12 saves. “We are going to miss him.”

While the result stung, Quirk had no qualms with how his players competed collectively to the end of the game.

“These guys and their character, there is nothing else you can say,” said Quirk. “They didn’t give up, they just kept fighting.”

That character and fight helped Hun produce a stellar 13-4-2 campaign this fall.

“It was very, very successful,” said Quirk in assessing the season. “It is a great group of kids that battled for each other. The record is one of the best ones we have had in a while. Everybody knew what their role was each and every day. Every single kid had something to do with a win within the season. It wasn’t that we would only go 12 guys deep, we played everybody as much as we could.”
In a lengthy postgame huddle that saw the players and coaches standing together with arms interlocked, the squad reflected on its memorable run.

“It was just keep their heads up and how proud we were of them we are and how thankful we are to be able to coach them,” said Quirk of the postgame talk. “Pennington is a really good team so don’t put your heads down. They are a team that can expose little mistakes and that is what happened.”