There were a lot of people who figured that Whitehall wouldn’t be able to capably defend their 2014 District 11 Championship because of the losses the team took in graduation.

While they fell short of a second straight district title, they reached the district finals again this season, falling to Parkland 2-0 at J. Birney Crum Stadium in Allentown last Thursday.

Rachel Laird did the damage for the Lady Trojans, scoring two, second-half goals. Both teams had opportunities, but battled to a scoreless tie at halftime before Laird struck with her first goal with 20:29 left to play in the second-half. She then added another less than four-minutes later. Parkland will now go on to represent District 11 in the PIAA Playoffs.

Senior goalkeeper Shianne Reimer made nine saves on the night, keeping her team in the game. Many of the saves weren’t of the routine variety, leaving Reimer jumping and diving to stop shots.

“Al [Haddad, Parkland coach] should be really proud of his team, because they are very good. They have a lot of weapons,” said Whitehall coach Dave Weitzman, whose team had to battle not only Parkland, but the fatigue of key players, who are two-sport athletes.

“Four of our starters play field hockey and they had a game yesterday against Stroudsburg, so we played the semifinal soccer Tuesday and they played in the semifinal field hockey game yesterday, so to ask these girls to come out here and play another 80-minutes is really difficult.

“I am so pleased and appreciative of how hard our girls work, they never quit and they’re all just amazing. My two years here have been really special with this senior group. They’ve given me a lot of things to remember and a lot of things to cherish and I’m so proud of them. They’ve represented the school in every classy way, with a lot of integrity.”

Senior Taylor George was happy with how the younger players on the team stepped up this season to help push the team into the district finals.

“I’m really proud of the team just coming back from last year’s district championship, we lost three really key players and just to have the season that we did is really something to be proud of,” said George. “The things I’m going to remember are one, the district championship, but more importantly, just all the friendships that I made, the great memories that we made and just learning to play with each other and for each other.”

Weitzman’s work in reloading his team this season will come in handy, because he’s going to have much the same task this offseason, losing nine seniors, five of which started in the final game.

“We started three freshmen and we have a lot of other players, like Cara Bonshak, who is a junior and one of our captains is coming back, we have a good young goalkeeper, that’s a freshman that will be coming up and we have a few kids in eighth grade that we know about that are good players that will be coming up to join us next year,” explained Weitzman. “I think we’ll be right back and be able to compete to get into districts and, hopefully, an East Penn Conference championship, as well. I think we’re just going to reload.”