Experienced Cloquet-Carlton Girls Soccer Eyeing Another Big Season

This year's team is led by nine seniors with a lot of speed, scoring ability and experience up front as they aim for their third straight section title.

CLOQUET, Minn. – This year’s soccer season officially gets started on Thursday afternoon and the Cloquet-Carlton girls soccer team is entering the season with high expectations and are ready to continue on what they’ve built the past few years.

With no state tournament last season, the Lumberjacks dropped just one game and had the unique opportunity to end their season with a win after clinching back-to-back section 7A titles.

While letting their seniors end things with a win was nice, this year’s squad is already motivated to get back to state.

“We know that there are some standards that have been set but none of us are nervous about it. We know we can do it, we know we can handle the pressure. We know that we’re one of the strongest competitors in the conference and the section so we’re just super excited to be able to get back to it and see those stronger teams in the section tournament and the state tournament,” forward Katie Turner said.

“The opportunity to play in the state tournament doesn’t always come around and so when that’s missed it’s kind of a bummer. We definitely have to work for it, we have to earn it, we don’t have that sort of expectation of this is just ours. We have to play game by game and see how it goes,” head coach Dustin Randall added.

This year’s team is led by nine seniors with a lot of speed, scoring ability and experience up front. But the main thing is they graduated their goalkeeper and four out of their five starters on their back line.

“We really had to rebuild the entire back line and that comes with moving players out of the midfield and out of the forward spots so it’s really different and we’re just trying to rebuild that all,” defender Sadie Senich said.

“We’re really excited about our new goalkeeper but stepping in for someone’s who been the goalkeeper for three years and won a bunch of awards and really been the anchor of our team is hard. We’re really excited about that opportunity but it’s always like well let’s see what we can do. We really like a lot of our returning players and really a lot of quality players all over the field so we feel pretty good,” Randall added.

Cloquet-Carlton will host St. Francis Thursday afternoon with kickoff set for 2:00 p.m.