The Emmaus girls soccer team qualified for the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference playoffs, but immediately found itself in a tough spot.

Not only did the Hornets have to play Central Catholic, a team that they beat 1-0 just two days earlier, but they had to do it without team captain Reilly McGinnis and coach Sarah Oswald. McGinnis was at West Point on an official visit that couldn’t be postponed, and Oswald had committed to being in a wedding.

Nothing against McGinnis or Oswald, but their absence didn’t really seem to matter too much as the Lady Hornets methodically beat the Vikettes 3-0 to advance to the conference semifinals against seventh-seeded Stroudsburg.

“It’s all the hard work that the girls have put in,” said assistant coach Aaron Gavin, who took over the team for the day. “I didn’t say anything out there to them that we haven’t said to them hundreds of times before and because they’ve done it 99 times before, this 100th time is just me reminding them.

“It’s not my nature to be up on the touch-line and yelling to them, but I did a little bit of that today. None of it was about coaching today, it was all about the hard work that they’ve put in the past six or seven months and it’s all blossoming now.”

Gavin said that the team didn’t look to replace McGinnis, but simply looked to players to step up and help lead the team against Central Catholic.

“You can’t replace Reilly, so it’s a fool’s errand to say ‘you’re going to be Reilly today,’” said Gavin. “We look at all the things that she does and the others pick up the load. It’s not like we made a one-for-one sub. They just all picked up parts of her game.

“I think too, it’s that we didn’t want to let down Reilly, and we didn’t want to let down coach Oswald and that camaraderie and playing for each other is a big part of it. We don’t look to replace her and I certainly didn’t try to replace coach Oswald, we just do what we can do and have confidence in each other.”

The defense turned in an exceptional showing, but that’s been par for the course for much of the season.

Emmaus now has four straight shutouts and has held opponents scoreless in five of their last six games, which is helping to relax the team and give them confidence. Sarah Schuster came up with big plays on defense and Jess Harnett continued her strong play in goal.

“They’re very good,” said Schuster of Central Catholic. “The wide midfielders just stay up there and we have to sprint back to mark them, so it’s a hard team to play.

“We worked really hard and I thought we played amazing. Definitely, Chrissie Lambert played really well, and so did Julianna [Fedorich]. They were working really hard and did really well.”

Gavin believes that the strong back line and big play ability of Harnett gives both the confidence to look to make big plays.

“They know how to play our system and what to do,” Gavin said. “They come up big, with Jess [goalkeeper Jess Harnett] making a bunch of saves, some of them that she has no business being able to make.

“When you know she’s going to be back there to back you up if you mess up, it builds confidence and makes it so much easier to play and have fun. I think that shows how confident they are in that back line and in Jess.”

Neither the players, nor Gavin showed any nervousness over having to play without McGinnis and Oswald, but there’s at least one person who may have just been hiding that nervousness well and didn’t let it show.

“I guess now I can say it, yeah, I was very nervous this morning,” said Gavin, who is in his 10th season as an assistant with the team. “Not because I didn’t think the girls could do it, because I knew that they could, but it’s just that when you’re that person, there’s pressure. Sarah is so great at making in-game adjustments and she knows the game so well and if something’s not working, she can change things on the fly and [she] is so game-aware.

“They played so well, that I didn’t have to make a lot of changes. The things that we needed to talk about, we could do at halftime and my confidence in them made it a lot easier. But yeah, I was nervous.”