Before the Virginia High School League expanded the number of state championships to its current four, some of the best competition throughout the commonwealth occurred in the Northern Virginia regional of Class AAA. Oakton (Va.) provided a great backdrop and side-by-side fields where you could watch both games in shifts if you wanted to.
The Oakton field hockey team and boosters would decorate the fence alongside one of the fields with colored plastic cups spelling out “Final 8,” or “Semifinal” or whichever round happened to be playing that day.
The action would be fast and furious, and the fans would occasionally engage in good-natured banter with the umpires; they were seated much closer than the usual distance between the sideline and the front row of the bleachers.
A lot has changed in the last few years: teams in what had been one region are spread out in Class 6A amongst Region B and Region C. But the principle for teams all around Virginia are the same: usually, the most tense games in and around the Commonwealth are the regional semifinals. Only in Virginia do all of the regional semifinalists in each enrollment classification make it automatically to the single-elimination state tournament.
This is what I have defined as “the tipping point,” where a semifinal win in the regionals guarantees you two more games, while a loss sends that team thinking about what it could have done differently for the next 10 months.
However, there have been times when it’s the round before — the quarterfinal rounds — that produce the dramatic hockey. About 20 years ago, a twin doubleheader in the VHSL AAA Northern Tournament yielded three overtime matches and some heroics on the part of the winning teams.
Last night, a VHSL Class 6A, Region D matchup between McLean Langley (Va.) and Vienna James Madison (Va.) became a taut, tense battle. Langley held a 1-0 lead deep into regulation before Claire Casto had the equalizer.
The game went into extra time and, in the 64th minute, Casto scored again to win the game and a spot in the last four of the regional tournament, and will take on Arlington Yorktown (Va.) in the semifinal round next Monday. It’s a tipping point game between two former VHSL state champions, and should be an amazing matchup.