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Swain County’s Maroon Devils soccer team were named the Smoky Mountain Conference Champions. The team made it to the third round in the playoff games.
Hannah Styles
hstyles@thesmokymountaintimes.com
Unfortunately, an awesome season for Maroon Devils highlighted by a conference win has come to an end in the third round of playoff games.
Swain played the #1 ranked team in the 1A West Division, Christ the King Crusaders, on Monday night and were unable to score.
The other team’s dribbling was highly efficient, and they were able to drive the ball to score on Swain. The game ended with 6-0, four of those goals being scored in the first half. Swain held them to two goals in the last half.
Devils goalkeeper Cameron Phillips did a great job protecting the goal as much as he could from the hard-hitting Crusaders as well as defensive players Levi and Lucas Trantham, Taligwo Walker, and Canon Helpman just to name a few.
Smoky Mountain Conference Champs
Swain was recognized for winning the Smoky Mountain Conference Championship for the second year in a row, this time with an undefeated conference record.
Coach Scott Cline was recognized as the Smoky Mountain Conference Coach of the Year for the second year in a row also.
Swain led the way with four players selected as All Conference.
“This was a really hard decision for the coaches in the conference to make. The issue was we could only nominate four players due to losing two teams in the conference this season,” said Coach Cline. “We had a lot of players that really stood out and could have been selected.”
All conference
The four players that were honored for All Conference were senior Gavin Lanning, junior Landon Matz, senior Levi Trantham, and senior Lucas Trantham.
Junior Landon Matz was selected as the Smoky Mountain Conference Player of the Year. This would be the third year in a row that Swain had a Player of the Year in soccer.
Congratulations to the SMC Champs Swain soccer for a remarkable 2021 season!