After 110 minutes of scoreless play, the Western Kentucky soccer team defeated North Texas 4-3 on penalty kicks to advance to Saturday’s Sun Belt Conference Tournament Championship game in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
Senior goalkeeper Libby Stout made six saves in the game, including two saves in the shootout to send the Lady Toppers (13-6-2) to their second Sun Belt Tournament final in four years.
WKU controlled possession in the first overtime, keeping North Texas from taking a shot. Lindsay Williams had the lone shot of the period, but sent the ball over the goal and the game into a second overtime.
The Lady Toppers came close to the game winner in the second overtime, but shots by Courtney Rymer and Ali Stahlke were stopped by Jackie Kerestine in the 103rd minute. North Texas had one shot in the second overtime.
A header by Michelle Young went wide of the goal in the 108th minute, leading to a deciding penalty kick shootout for a spot in the championship game.
Stahlke, Williams, Kiersten Ottaway and Chrissy Tchoula all scored for WKU in penalty kicks, and Stout stopped the Mean Green’s final attempt to send the Lady Toppers to Saturday’s title match.
This is the third straight year that WKU has gone to penalty kicks in the Sun Belt Tournament and the first time the Lady Toppers have come out on top in the shootout.
WKU will face Florida International in the championship game at 1 p.m. Saturday at Dean A. Hayes Track and Soccer Stadium.
The second-seeded Panthers defeated third-seeded Denver 3-1 in Thursday’s first semifinal. FIU and the Lady Toppers played to a scoreless draw at the WKU Soccer Complex on Oct. 7.
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After the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Elijah Wood could've opted for further big budget epics, but took a sharp left turn with this better-than-average B-movie. Released just after Everything is Illuminated, another offbeat entry, Wood plays journalism student Matt Buckner. In the prologue, he's expelled from Harvard when his over-privileged roommate sets him up to take the fall for his own misdeeds. With nowhere to go, Matt decides to visit his sister, Shannon (Claire Forlani), in London. He's already got a chip on his shoulder when he falls under the sway of Shannon's brother-in-law, Pete (Charlie Hunnam), head of West Ham's football "firm," the Green Street Elite. Matt soon gets caught up in their thuggish antics—to tragic effect. In her feature debut, German-born Lexi Alexander makes a mostly convincing case for the attractions of violence to the emotionally vulnerable, as opposed to the emotionally numb pugilists of the more satirical Fight Club. Unlike David Fincher (by way of Chuck Palahniuk), she plays it straight, except for the stylized fight sequences. Consequently, humor is in short supply, but the young Brit cast, especially Leo Gregory as the surly Bovver, is charismatic and Wood makes his character as believable as possible, i.e. he may seem miscast, but that's the point. Although there's no (direct) correlation between the two, Green Street makes a fine taster for Bill Buford's Among the Thugs, the ultimate dissection of the hooligan mentality. --Kathleen C. Fennessy