Central Hardin meets South Oldham to decide the KHSAA Girls Soccer State Tournament champion on Saturday. The Bruins (26-0-3) defeated perennial challenger Paul Laurence Dunbar 1-0 on Tuesday to make the final for the first time. The Dragons (17-1-2) are looking for their ninth title in program history. I spoke with Maddock about the Bruins’ rise, what makes their stingy defense so effective and how they’ll approach the program’s first state title appearance.

Questions and answers lightly edited for clarity and flow.

KHSD: How did Central Hardin grow from a program that hadn’t made many state tournaments before this decade and now could win one?

Justin Maddock: So between Central Hardin, Bardstown, Bethlehem and Elizabethtown, our region has always been really good. A long time ago Elizabethtown was dominant in the region, and about 10-15 years ago is when it started becoming pretty even in the sense that any of those four teams could consistently compete to win the 5th Region. In 2018, the year before I took it over, Central Hardin did really well. They beat Bethlehem in overtime to go to state, and that year they ran into South Oldham and lost pretty handily (note: South Oldham won 8-0). At that time South Oldham and other schools were clearly at a different level than our program.

Over the last 3-4 years, we’ve grown a lot of depth, we have a lot of girls that play club soccer year-round. Our local club has grown to where they’re nurturing a lot of talent and all the area teams have benefited from that. Every season for the past four years we’ve had 45-55 girls in our program, freshmen through varsity, and 99% of them play club soccer all year. We’re not having to create a new team of girls every two years anymore, you’ve got 8-10 in each class who’ve been part of the program from freshman to JV to varsity. That’s what the Sacred Hearts, Assumptions, Dunbars, LexCaths and South Oldhams have done over the years. We’ve just gotten to that point now.

KHSD: Your team has shutout 12 straight opponents and has 21 total on the season (matching a state record set by South Oldham’s ninth title team in 2022). I’ll just ask it bluntly: what makes your defense so good?

Maddock: They're a resilient group. As a team, whether it's scoring or defending — we all kind of want to put it on one or two positions — but we do a really good job of doing both sides of the ball as a group.

When you can keep the ball on the other team's offensive half, that's going to limit the opportunities for them to get shots off, and therefore, if they're not getting shots off, we're not having to defend as many scary opportunities. So most of the year, we have been on the front foot and and keeping them on the offensive half, and then when we lose it, we defend pretty quickly to try to get it back, from our forwards all the way back to our goalkeeper. So when we do that, that resilience to just press and go get the ball back as soon as we can, it makes our job easier.

But then when you combine, a back four that really work well together? I wouldn't call us the fastest backline but they shift well together, they communicate well together, they spend a lot of time around each other at sessions talking, and they really understand pressure-cover-balance really good as a back four. And when your goalkeeper, Hannah (Ferguson), has been around since her freshman year and has so much experience and is constantly back there talking? It leads to shutouts and she's made 1-2 big saves every game against the top opponents we've played. So when we do have a breakdown, we have a goalkeeper that's ready to make the save that we need to get a shutout.

Paul Laurence Dunbar is a really good team. They might be one of the strongest teams we've seen all year, and that includes a Center Grove team out of Indianapolis that lost in the state finals to Hamilton Southeast, who is technically the number one team in the country for the past two years (note: Center Grove is ranked No. 5 nationally by MaxPreps). We were 0-0 against them and they created a few more opportunities against us than most teams, and Paul Laurence Dunbar created more opportunities against us than they did. Playing them, Notre Dame, Assumption, Sacred Heart, our region with Bethlehem and E-Town, and North Oldham — who held us to 0-0 until the last like 20 seconds — having those experiences, created a resilience that when we were going against Paul Laurence Dunbar the last 10 minutes and we’re just trying to keep them out of the net, they handled it pretty well.

KHSD: You defeated South Oldham 2-1 at their place to start last year’s state tournament and advanced to the semifinals from there. Can you look to that game for anything to use on Saturday or is this a case of focusing totally on the present?

Maddock: I think you gotta try to take a little bit from everything. I don't want to ignore last year. That's why we have history, right? So we don't repeat any of the negatives and we can learn how to repeat some of the positives of it. Last year was a good experience for us. South Oldham's been a great team every year and they they weren't any different last year. They were great. We were able beat them 2-1 by just continuing to go after them, taking shots, getting the ball into the box. When you do that, you're going to give yourself a chance of score.

Obviously they're going to come into the game with their own little chip. They are the winningest in girls soccer when you look at state titles and stuff like that. But the group that they have now, they're not going to rest their laurels on that. They're going to be connected to, “hey, we played them last year, it's a game that we want to atone for,” so they're going to come with that energy. And they have been really good all year too. They've had the one loss, which was like the first week of the season. So they're gonna come with that experience and that confidence of like “hey, yeah, they might be ahead of us in some numbers, but we're good.” We'll just have to be prepared for that.

As far as the game plan, we're aware of some of the things they do really well and they're going to do those things really well no matter what we do So we just have to improve on what we do. Against Paul Laurence Dunbar the first 10 minutes, we didn't really accomplish the things we worked on and talked about for us. So we have to be better Saturday in that. The focus will be reminding them of what we do well amd what we want to do well. And as long as we come out ready, that's going to put us in a good spot. But if we don't, I mean, we could be down 1 to nothing and they don't give up very many goals either. So we must really, really, really focus on our strengths. If we do that, then we should be in a pretty good position to see what it's like at the end of the 80 minutes.

Central Hardin plays South Oldham in the girls state championship game at 4 p.m. Saturday at Lexington Sporting Club. The boys state championship game between Paul Laurence Dunbar and St. Xavier is scheduled to follow at 7:30 p.m.

I published newsletters for about 2½ weeks prior, but this was Kentucky High School Daily’s “official” launch week. You folks blew away my expectations.

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The 1st & 2nd Region preview was an especially strong subscription driver this week, which speaks to my firm belief that Kentuckians crave high school football and basketball coverage from a consistent source that aims to share their scores, stats and as many good stories as possible — from across our entire state. Kentucky High School Daily isn’t for those living in Lexington or Louisville or Covington or Pikeville or Paducah or Bowling Green. It’s for everyone in Kentucky.

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