Gardena Serra’s ‘League of Champions’ win previews excitement for girls’ flag football

They screamed. They cried. They embraced.

As a ultimate move fell incomplete Sunday afternoon, clinching a 19-18 win over Lengthy Seaside Poly and the first-ever ladies’ championship for Gardena Serra Excessive ladies’ flag soccer, the Cavaliers poured out each drop of emotion from swelling their hearts.

Good luck discovering a postgame celebration in any sport that contained as a lot sheer pleasure. Among the ladies had hassle catching passes early within the season, Serra coach Monique Adams mentioned, and so they become lightning-quick athletes inside a number of months. A few of them are like Serra’s Kaylah Holmes, who grew up roughhousing together with her brothers and has been craving to play soccer since she was 5 years outdated.

It was a phenomenal preview of the sheer pleasure that ladies’ flag soccer can carry to California excessive colleges this fall — if handed by the CIF at a state federated council assembly Friday.

“All boys mentioned ladies can’t do nothing,” mentioned Holmes, who caught the eventual game-winning landing. “However we did it. Undefeated.”

Serra emerged victorious from a 16-team discipline at Redondo Union Excessive in Sunday championships for the “League of Champions,” an area ladies’ flag soccer league sponsored by the Rams and Chargers in its second season. In an ironic twist, they took on Lengthy Seaside Poly within the ultimate recreation, the delivery of a brand new Serra-Poly rivalry after years of iconic battles between the packages in deal with soccer.

Serra soccer coach Scott Altenberg, who’d coached the group for a few months earlier than handing the reins to Adams — the coach for professional ladies’s deal with group Los Angeles Legends — provided tips to the Cavaliers from the sidelines. Poly coach Stephen Barbee was teaching the Jackrabbits from the other sideline. It was Altenberg vs. Barbee once more in a special context.

“It’s like it doesn’t matter what we do — we could possibly be taking part in badminton,” Altenberg mentioned of the Serra-Poly showdown. “We’re made to be rivals.”

The Cavaliers trailed at halftime, gamers huddling, some crying.

“We are able to’t battle with tears in our eyes!” one woman shouted.

They mounted a livid comeback, Holmes, who additionally performs basketball, securing a brief move ultimately zone to place Serra up for good with a minute left.

Paula Hart Rodas, president of the Southern Part’s council, has largely led the push for women’ flag soccer to be instituted at the highschool degree. In December 2021, she remembered presenting Gardena Serra with the CIF Southern California regional trophy after a good win over Lengthy Seaside Poly. And Sunday afternoon at Redondo, she watched one other department of the rivalry develop.

“How loopy is it, in our first little Tremendous Bowl, that it’s Poly-Serra … that’s what it’s about,” Rodas mentioned.