In a game highlighted by physical play and officiating that seemed to hurt both teams, Whitehall wound up dropping a 1-0 double-overtime game to Emmaus that ended the Zephyrs season with a loss in the district quarterfinals.

During regulation, the officials called a penalty in the box on Whitehall and awarded Emmaus a penalty-kick. Dakota Bauer took the kick, but bounced it off the crossbar, keeping the game scoreless. With 80 minutes of scoreless soccer in regulation and an additional 15 minutes in the first overtime, tempers started to flare a little as they entered the second overtime period.

The result was a couple of yellow cards for players on both sides and a red card to Emmaus’ Jonathan Heberlein. Perhaps because of the escalating physical play, the refs seemed to clamp down and made another big call against Whitehall setting up a second penalty kick for the Hornets.

“They were absolutely over-officiating and I don’t know why they felt the need to do that. The two players got tangled up, but it was the half second and they were both running off the field, so there was no need for that,” said Whitehall coach Chris Bastidas. “There weren’t really any dangerous plays beside that, so it felt to me that the referees felt that they needed to over-officiate. There was absolutely no need for that.

“It was a terrible call, I don’t know how else to explain it. I don’t know what was called, the other coach doesn’t know what was called, I have no explanation as to what was called; they [the refs] ran out of here afterward. Earlier, they made another terrible call to give them a PK. Giving a team two PKs is not what I expect from referees.”

Thomas Hanvey took the second PK and rolled it past Zephyrs goalie Alex Khoury for the game-winning goal.

“I didn’t see it, but I asked ‘what is this and what’s going on?’ and they didn’t give me any explanation, they just got out of here,” said Emmaus coach John Cari. “I can understand why Chris feels frustrated, because they played great and he deserved a chance to go to PKs there at the end.”

It didn’t come as a surprise to Bastidas that his team, seeded seventh in districts, put a scare into number-two seed Emmaus.

With both teams having a bye in the first round, Bastidas used the time to do some work on figuring out how Emmaus had won both regular season games by a combined score of 8-0 and went to work on a game plan to combat the earlier struggles.

“Our team was awesome. We played them twice already and we went back and analyzed what they were doing and we found a couple of holes and weaknesses, even though they’re a good team, and our team played to perfection as to what we wanted to accomplish,” said Bastidas. “We got in on them, we had opportunities to score and I thought this was the best game we played all season, so it’s unfortunate to lose in a way where it feels like it was taken from you as opposed to anything else.”