Glenn Is Too Much For Westhampton Beach In Boys Soccer Playoff Opener

Despite defeating Elwood-John Glenn earlier this season in a non-league game, 3-0, Westhampton Beach boys soccer head coach Cody Hoyt knew that when his team met back up with the Knights on their home field on Monday afternoon in the opening round of the Suffolk County Class A playoffs, things would be different.

Glenn is a model of consistency of reaching the postseason and it is not shy of letting that fact be known, with each year the team has made the playoffs since 1977 visibly placed on its roster — for the record, the Knights have reached the playoffs 38 times over that 44-year span.

Plain and simple — Glenn knows how to further its season and it knows what it takes to win a playoff game. As Hoyt alluded to after his team’s 5-0 defeat on Monday, the Hurricanes did qualify for the playoffs in back-to-back seasons but have nowhere near the playoff pedigree of the Knights, and it showed.

“No matter what, playoffs is just a different atmosphere,” he said. “I told my boys, too, John Glenn is used to this atmosphere — unfortunately we’re not. We didn’t have it last year because of what happened. They know what it takes … it’s all or nothing, and they have that experience, they know that feeling and they showed it today.”

Hoyt was mentioning last season, the shortened COVID campaign, in which his team qualified for the playoffs only to have nearly the entire team shut down due to COVID protocols just a day or two before it was supposed to play on the very same field it did on Monday at Glenn. The very shorthanded ’Canes, made up of mostly junior varsity players in that game, suffered a loss, but had a chance to turn those fortunes around.

Senior co-captain Andre Insalaco nearly put Westhampton Beach on the board in the game’s first minute when he had a nice touch on an incoming corner kick that just sailed over the left corner of the goal. The ’Canes played well through the first few minutes, but with just over 23 minutes remaining in the first half, Glenn junior Anthony Randazzo beat his defender and Westhampton Beach senior goalie Alessandro Volpe came out to meet him one-on-one. Randazzo went five-hole on Volpe, who got a piece of the ball but not enough, as the ball trickled into the open goal to give Glenn a 1-0 lead.

Six minutes later, the Westhampton Beach defense couldn’t settle a bouncing ball in its defensive box. Instead, Glenn junior Xavier Rosado did and was able to get a shot off into the bottom left corner for a goal to make a 2-0 game. The Knights struck again seven minutes later, when senior Anthony Schieble made a nice move to beat his defender, sent a pass into the box that junior James Rourke was able to get a foot on and score, and just like that, Glenn had a commanding 3-0 lead at halftime.

Randazzo scored seven minutes into the second half then added his third in the game with just under 12 minutes remaining for the hat trick, but more importantly, advanced his team to a county quarterfinal matchup with No. 3 Shoreham-Wading River this Thursday, October 28, at 4 p.m.

Insalaco mentioned after the game that down the final stretch in which his team went 3-2-2, it held the lead in most of those losses and ties.

“That’s kind of been the story of our season — good performances, bad results,” he said. “We've been starting well, we've been playing well, we just haven’t been able to close. Offensively, I think we had three or four great chances, but we definitely didn’t create enough.

“Definitely not the way we wanted to go out, and a lot different than last time because that was a pretty dominate performance last time around,” Insalaco added.

Although it was tough being on the bad end of a lopsided score, Hoyt said the outgoing seniors — which includes Insalaco, Volpe, co-captain Loris Van Vlodrop, Michael Griffin, Aidan Kellachan and Liam McMunn — have a lot to be proud of. Along with last season’s 11 players, they are responsible to bringing the program back to the playoffs after a somewhat lengthy absence. And after graduating nearly a dozen players after last season, not many pegged the ’Canes to get back to the postseason, but they were.

“We've been defying odds and going against what the coaches polls have been saying all year, putting up results against teams that were supposed to be a lot better than us,” Insalaco said.

“That’s what we kind of we talked about in the huddle, obviously not the way we wanted it to end, nothing we can say right now to make any of it better, but you got to look back at both the accomplishment of last year and this year,” and be proud of that, Hoyt said. “The six seniors this year, six starters, definitely heart and souls of the team, kind of the back bone, they’ve done a lot for us. They were all impact players last year and this year. They've set the bar high for these younger kids.”