High school girls soccer: Ogden squeaks out 3A semifinal win, Manti rolls in setting up a title game rematch

Here’s a recap of Thursday’s 3A girls soccer semifinal matches at Zions Bank Stadium in Herriman, with No. 1 Manti and No. 2 Ogden both winning to advance to Saturday’s championship showdown.

Manti 4, Richfield 0

When Richfield and Manti met in the regular season two months ago, Manti had to sweat out a one-goal win.

The much-anticipated rematch in Thursday’s 3A semifinals was a much more comfortable outing for the Templars.

Top-seed Manti opened the scoring just four minutes into the match, and it never let up in a dominant 4-0 win over No. 4 Richfield to advance to its second straight 3A state championship match.

It will face the same Ogden team in Saturday’s final that it lost to last season 5-1.

“We were at a tournament in the summer and I said right there, ‘Girls, you can play for the state championship game. Whether you win it or not is going to be what you do from July, and then it’s going to come down to how hard you want to work.’ Can’t be more excited for these girls to even give themselves a chance to play for it,” said Templars coach Nate Bridges.

Kickoff for the state championship is Saturday at 11 a.m.

“Losing some of the girls we lost last year, they were tough to replace so we just had to work twice as hard to get back where we’re at, but it’s going to be a fun game,” Bridges said.

Madelyn Bridges needed just four minutes to tally for Manti in the semis, scoring on a shot from distance for her team-leading 25th goal of the season for the early lead.

“She’s very good outside the box. She’s extremely accurate, puts in a ton of time doing it, but she’s got a great leg to get it there, and it has been one of her main weapons,” said coach Bridges, her father.

“If you don’t step up on our midfielders, particularly her, she’ll hurt you from the outside.”

The Templars controlled possession throughout the first half, spending the majority of the time in their attacking half. They were rewarded in the 15th minute as Ella Thompson pounced on a mistake at the back for an easy finish to extend the cushion to 2-0.

“Our No. 1 goal today was to try and get a goal early,” coach Bridges said. “Playing them the first time was really tough. I mean, congratulations to (Richfield coach) Dave (Tait) and his team — they really are that good defensively.

It was tough down there at their place. Getting a goal early today was our No. 1 priority."

Leading comfortably at intermission, Manti quickly put the game out of reach in the second half.

Madelyn Bridges scored her 26th goal of the season less than a minute into the second half on another long-range effort, and then McKinzee Chidester extended the lead to 4-0 in the 49th minute, slipping a simple close-range shot past the keeper.

The challenge for Manti is now figuring out how to compete with Ogden in the final.

The Templars have only played the Tigers three times in school history, all in the past two years. They lost to Ogden 3-0 in the semifinals in 2024, and then last year 5-0 in the preseason and 5-1 in the title game.

“After the game last year, right, two reporters asked me about Ogden,” coach Bridges said. “Obviously they were great, right? I said, ‘Well, we got to make a choice. We’re either going to get better, or we’re going to continue to get beat,’ and so we just made a lot of adjustments and a lot of offseason workouts and just things we needed to do to try and get better.

“I’m hoping that we can close the gap.”

Ogden 2, Morgan 1

Ogden overcame Mother Nature and a spirited effort from rival Morgan on Thursday to advance to its eighth state championship game.

On a rainy, windy afternoon at Zions Bank Stadium, Alonda Ayala lofted a 74th-minute shot up and over the outstretched fingertips of the Trojans’ keeper to punch the Tigers’ ticket to Saturday’s 3A final with a 2-1 victory.

Ogden will meet Manti in the championship, a rematch of last year’s easy 5-1 win for the Tigers.

“Can’t wait,” said Ogden head coach Alexis King. “Haven’t seen them this season, haven’t played them yet, and I can’t wait to play them.”

The Tigers are 4-3 in their previous seven championship game appearances, including beating Morgan in the 2021 and 2023 finals.

A return trip was very much up in the air Thursday as the tension built throughout the second half following Morgan’s equalizing goal just three minutes out of halftime.

Both teams had decent chances to pull ahead at different points in the second half, but King always felt her team was destined to secure a sixth straight win over Morgan.

“I don’t believe we’ll lose a game until there’s a minute left on the clock. There has to be seconds left for me to think that we’ll lose, ‘cause I’ve seen them score with less than two minutes on the clock before, so I know that they’ll keep working at the end,” King said.

“So that early goal, yeah, it’s a little scary, but I’m like, ‘We still have 36 minutes of soccer. We can score another.’”

Shortly after inserting Ayala and Elle Weston back into the match as she tried to keep fresh legs on the field for crunch time, Ogden’s coach looked at the duo who would ultimately combine on the winning goal and asked a simple question.

“I said, ‘Do you guys want to score? Because I need somebody that wants to score. Right now, it feels like you guys don’t want to.’ It didn’t feel like we were attacking the goal hard enough,” King said.

Not long after, the breakthrough came.

Weston found Ayala near the edge of the penalty, and she took a quick dribble to create a better angle and lofted a shot on frame that Morgan’s keeper got her fingertips to, but not enough to prevent it from dropping down just over the goal line for the 2-1 lead.

The Tigers locked the match down from there as the Trojans found space in the attacking half difficult to come by.

“We knew that today was going to be a really hard game and we were really going to have to earn it,” King said. “I just told them ‘Let’s go out and be confident. You guys have done all the work. We’ve had hard practices in the rain to help us prepare for this moment,’ and I’m just really proud of them.”

Ogden won the coin toss and elected to attack with strong wind at its back in the first half. It paid off within 18 minutes as Bryleigh Thomas played a perfect ball into space for Gwenyth Aardema, who ran onto it in the box and slipped a quick shot past Morgan’s keeper for the early 1-0 lead.

Just three minutes into the second half, the Trojans equalized by taking advantage of the Tigers’ inability to clear the ball out of danger.

After the ball pinged around a few times in the box, Monea Whimpey collected it just outside box, taking a quick touch around a defender and then smashing it into the top corner of the net.