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photo by: Andrew Grimm

The Huskies' Parker McAfee fires a shot on a ball in midair during Thursday's tournament game.

CADIZ — In soccer, sometimes all it takes is one.

That is indeed all it took for East Liverpool to pull a tournament upset on a chilly night in Cadiz Thursday as the Potters avenged a regular season defeat to Harrison Central with a 1-0 victory at Wagner Field.

East Liverpool, the No. 11 seed, got a goal from Nathan Schwerha just over 10 minutes into the game and made it stand up the rest of the way to stun the No. 7 seed Huskies.

“We had some keys coming into this we wanted to focus on, they beat us the last time we played them,” East Liverpool head coach Mike Hilliard said. “They had a couple guys we were worried about and we thought if we could take them out of their game and capitalize on our opportunities we would have a shot. Nate had his opportunity and took it and buried. This time of the year is about finding a way and surving and advancing, that’s what we did.

“Our big conversation before we came down here was everyone is 0-0 now and anything can happen.”

Harrison Central (7-8-2), which won a regular season meeting between the clubs 4-0 back on Sept. 10, had several chances, but either missed the net completely and put a couple of shots square into Potters keeper Dominic Johnson.

“This game kind of sums up our season,” Huskies coach Derek Gramling said. “We defend pretty well … we have our chances, we just struggle to put the ball in the back of the goal. We had 10, 12 shots and none of them went in. I don’t even know that we made their goalie make any great saves, we missed the goal completely a lot. It’s very frustrating, I hate it for my seniors.

“It hurts, but credit to East Liverpool – they came in here with a good game plan and made some adjustments from what they learned from the first game. They came here to play. As much as we missed our shots, East Liverpool did a good job of not giving us great looks.”

Johnson made a pair of saves in the final five minutes and the Huskies had another late opportunity, perhaps their best look of the game, sale high and wide of the net.

The Potters (4-9-3) advance to meet No. 1 seed River View on Tuesday back in Cadiz in the district semifinals.

For the Huskies, it was the end of the road for six seniors in Caleb Miller, Brady Elliott, Ocean Rogers, Cole Saiter, Austin Fulton and Kayden Dunkle.

“They’re great group of kids on and off the field,” Gramling said. “I’m really proud of them and was proud to be their coach. I told them it’s going to hurt tonight, but in a few months they will look back and be proud of our season.

“We had a very good season, we just kind of ran out of steam at the end of it.”