WHEELING — Saturday at Wheeling Island Stadium was a rematch of last year’s OVAC 1A-3A girls soccer championship, and at the end of 80 minutes, the repeat meeting between the Wheeling Central Maroon Knights and Steubenville Catholic Crusaders yielded the same result.

Wheeling Central repeated as OVAC champs Saturday, defeating the Crusaders 7-0, as Steubenville Catholic finished as conference runner-up for the second straight season.

“Super proud of them,” Wheeling Central head coach Ashley Winters said. “They played phenomenal. Super happy for our seniors, the ones that have been here all four years, and they deserve back-to-back championships. I couldn’t ask for anything else.”

Wheeling Central quickly built their lead Saturday, receiving two goals from sparkplug Loni Kusic and one goal from Rylee Wright all within the first 18 minutes of the game.

“I thought we tried something different to start, but we just made too many mistakes and gave them good shots early,” Steubenville Catholic head coach Jonathan Hoover said. “We played hard, every one of my players did, we just weren’t where we needed to be.”

Wheeling Central got great looks off of set pieces, with two goals in the second half coming off of designed plays on corner kicks- one that yielded Elah Konkle a clean center-cut shot after some nifty weaving and passing, and another perfectly executed set piece play which resulted in a Seneca Heller header goal in the 59th minute.

“We executed the game the way that we planned to execute it,” Winters said. ” We knew what they were going to do. They did exactly what they should have bought. They wanted to take a more defensive stance. They were going to park the bus. They were going to play more physical to prevent us from getting on the scoreboard. I give them a tremendous amount of credit. These first 40 minutes, they held us to 3-0.

“I give them all the credit in the world to coach Hoover seeing them here again for the second year in a row. But our girls came out ready. They came out prepared. They knew how they needed to play. They knew what they needed to do. They accomplished that. They can call themselves back-to-back champions.”

Between their two corner kick goals, Gianna Konkle put through a score on a free kick following a hand ball violation inside the penalty box.

One more score from Elah Konkle in the 60th minute brought the score to 7-0.

Despite one team having to take a loss, both squads are happy with where their teams are with the home stretch of the regular season coming down the pipeline.

“They’ve been playing well- the team has taken a couple of losses, some ties, but we’ve always bounced back,” Hoover said. “This was a tough matchup, they’re a good team, but I’m happy with how our team is performing.”

“Our team is just fantastic,” Winters said. “They’ve been amazing all year long. You know, this was one of our goals that we had for this year. This being the first goal, the second goal was making it to states. So we’re a little more than halfway through the season. The girls accomplished what we had set out to do since June.”