LEBANON — On a cold, rainy night here Thursday, Benjamin Logan’s hopes of another historic victory were washed away by a dynamic Cincinnati Wyoming team.
The Cowboys, ranked fourth in the Division II state coaches poll, jumped out to a 2-0 lead seven minutes into the game and went on to take a 7-0 victory over the Raiders in a boys district championship game at Lebanon High School.
“They are a really good team,” said Ben Logan head coach Jamie Hughes. “To beat a team like that, you have to have everything go your way and that didn’t happen.
“That’s the most talented team we’ve ever played. Their goal is to win a state championship. Our goal was to win a league title and then go as far as we could. We just didn’t get the breaks we needed to give ourselves a chance tonight. But now that we got this far, we know what it takes to win at this level. It’s a building block in where we want to go as a program.”
The Raiders relied on their stifling defense — they recorded a program-record eight shutouts this fall — to earn a spot in Thursday’s district title game, the deepest a Ben Logan team had ever been in the postseason.
But the Raiders struggled to contain an extremely skilled Cowboys attack.
Wyoming (17-2-1) set the tone with the two early goals and added three more for a 5-0 cushion at halftime.
“They play really quickly,” said Hughes. “It’s not that they are faster than us, they just really see everything very quickly and we are not quite there yet. We are getting there, but we still have a ways to go.”
The Cowboys added a sixth goal two minutes into the second half and tacked on another score with 18:58 left.
Ben Logan had trouble finding cracks in the Wyoming defense, managing just a handful of shots on goal.
While the result wasn’t what the Raiders were hoping for Thursday, it did nothing to diminish what they accomplished this season.
Ben Logan (13-5-1) won its first league title and finished with three more wins than the previous school best of 10 in 1993.
“There were a lot of firsts for us,” said Hughes. “It was a result of the guys’ hard work all season. It started back on June 1st when we were able to work in groups of 10 and we had guys doing workouts twice a day. All of them were here all summer and that set the tone for the season.”
The Raiders have a strong core of players coming back next year, but they must replace seven seniors.
“Those guys have won more games than any other class,” said Hughes. “Some of them have played four years and some played one. But their leadership this year was tremendous. We were down 2-0 at halftime in our first tournament game and then end up here in the district championship. They came together at halftime of that game and said this isn’t the way we should be doing things.”
Getting a taste of the district championship atmosphere has the Raiders already hungry to get back in the future.
“The bar has definitely been raised,” said Hughes. “They were talking about that on the bus on the way down here. They talked about making this the expectation from here on out.”