KETTERING - Last week the Fairmont Men’s Soccer Team closed out its regular season with a home game against Walnut Hills High School. The teams faced each other in last year’s District Championship with the Birds winning their first championship in sixteen years. From the opening kickoff, the Birds signaled their intent to extend their two-game win streak and carry that momentum into the postseason. In the twelfth minute Gavin Weaver sent a corner kick into the goal box that was saved off the goal line, and a minute later Noah Baumgarten saw his shot saved by the Eagles’ keeper. The attacking trio of Aaron Black, Freddy Irakoze, and Gavin Weaver wreaked havoc on the visitors throughout the game, and Irakoze nearly opened his account in the nineteenth minute from a Black through ball that skipped wide of the right post. Two minutes later, the trio notched the first goal of the match with Weaver sending a corner kick into the box to Irakoze who laid off to Black who then buried the ball in the net. In the twenty-fourth minute, Weaver whistled a shot just beyond the right post, and Irakoze missed a golden opportunity skying his shot from twelve yards away in the twenty-seventh minute. A minute later, quick one-touch passing from Black to Nassim Hennaoui to Weaver in the goal box produced the second goal of the half. Irakoze was free in space in the thirty-fourth minute, dribbled completely around the keeper, but scuffed his shot wide of the left post. The strength of Fairmont’s central midfielders Cristian Valdez and Trez Shaka clipped the visitors’ wings, and the Eagles were unable to mount any serious attack on goal. Fairmont went into halftime with a comfortable two-goal lead.

The Birds started the second half with the same flourish of intensity, and Irakoze played in Weaver, but his shot was straight at the keeper. Weaver made no mistake in the forty-sixth minute after he was played in by Black, maneuvered around a defender and placed the ball across the goalie and into the far post for his team-leading fourteenth goal of the season. Irakoze nearly bagged a goal in the fiftieth minute, but his left-footed shot missed just past the left post. Carson Whitaker cleared a shot off the goal line in the sixty-seventh minute to maintain Fairmont’s three-goal lead, and senior goalkeeper Ben Johnson made a heroic save at his right post from a missile of a worm burner in the seventy-first minute. Black capped the scoring with the last kick of the ball when Weaver played him into the box, and he slipped the ball past the keeper for his seventh goal of the season.