FENTON, Mo. - A player with the nondescript last name of Smith was anything but ordinary in Friday's first soccer game at the Class 3 Final Four.
Webster Groves' Sheriden Smith had a natural hat trick, scoring three goals in the game's first 33 minutes, and the Statesmen went on to post a 3-1 win against the Helias Crusaders at the World Wide Technology Soccer Park.
The Missouri State recruit got his first goal a little more than 12 minutes in, added another nine minutes later and got the other with slightly more than seven minutes before halftime.
While Helias won the second half by a 1-0 score, the damage done by Smith in the early stages was too much to overcome.
"He's a great player," Helias head coach Michael Metzger said of Smith. "He's fast, he moves off the ball, he's really quick, he's swift."
On the first, Smith took a pass from Jordan Andrews and blasted a shot that Helias goalkeeper Ben Mitan got his hands on, but the ball had enough momentum to travel across the goal line at the 27:53 mark.
Smith then scored unassisted at the 19:04 mark and with 7:12 left in the half, both times finding operating room among the defense before squeezing off shots.
"On a couple of his goals, we made him look pretty good," Metzger said. "We weren't matched up as well as we could have been and gave him space and obviously he used it and put them away."
Smith joined Mike Stein (Aquinas-Mercy, 1996), Dexter Johnson (Whitfield, 2002), Joe Germanese (St. Louis University High, 2003), Brad Peters (St. Dominic, 2004), Michael Ferguson (Pembroke Hill, 2005) and Ross Merrill (Pembroke Hill, 2006) as players to score a hat trick at the Final Four. He came up one goal short of tying the record of Lindbergh's John Maurer, who in 1994 became the only player to score four goals in a Final Four contest.
Webster Groves had an 8-0 edge in shots during the first half, but Helias was able to claim a 4-3 lead in that statistic after halftime.
"The intensity coming into the second half was better," Metzger said. "Why we have to be three goals down against the No. 1 team in the state for that to happen, I don't know. It just goes to show that we have to come out and play with intensity from the start of every game."
The Helias offense finally got going with 12 minutes remaining, and got three great chances in a two-minute span. The first came when a free kick by Sam Ferrier from midfield sailed just over the top of the crossbar, while the next came when Sam Heckart's header off a corner kick by Braden Remmert was cleared away.
"The goalkeeper made an unbelievable save on that one," Metzger said.
Helias finally got on the board with 11:54 left in the game, as Remmert came up with another pretty service that Heckart headed home.
"That was good for us to get that goal, for our confidence going into (today's third-place game)," Metzger said.
Webster Groves (24-5-2) will look to claim its second straight championship when it plays St. Dominic (17-10-2) at 2 p.m. today. Helias (17-11) will take on Grain Valley (20-7), a 4-0 loser to St. Dominic in the other semifinal, at 10 a.m. today for third place.
"We just played the No. 1 team in the state and yeah, we lost 3-1, but it was 1-0 in the second half in our favor, so that says something about our team," Metzger said. "We told the guys, "You can't go into tomorrow with your heads down. We don't want to get fourth, we want to get third.' We've just got to be ready to come and compete."