Girls Soccer Makes It Three in a Row!

The Colorado Academy Mustangs walked into Weidner Stadium in Colorado Springs for the 2026 3A Girls Soccer State Championship game on May 19 as No. 3-ranked underdogs, prepared to face off against their historic rival, the Kent Denver Sun Devils, who as the No. 1 seed carried all the momentum and buzz into a matchup they were heavily favored to win.

The odds against them didn’t matter one bit to the CA girls. 

After two hours of fierce battle, the squad was heading home with its third Championship trophy in a row, having surprised Kent by earning a 2-1 victory to give the Mustangs’ their eighth State Title overall. On filling up the Soccer trophy case in the CA Athletic Center right to the brim, Head Coach Sean Stedeford states matter-of-factly, “This is probably the greatest Colorado 3A Girls Soccer program of all time.”

(CA’s three-Championship streak got started with Stedeford at the helm in 2024 and continued in 2025.)

 

Winning this year against Kent put an exclamation point on the girls’ season in more ways than one: The Mustangs broke their seven-Championship tie with the Sun Devils, moving into second place all-time behind only Arapahoe High School. At the same moment, they bade farewell to Class 3A competition alongside their top-rated rival, with CA headed for Class 5A Soccer next year and Kent for 4A.

“We as a program want to keep evolving,” says Stedeford. “We, as coaches, want to evolve; our players want new challenges, and 5A is the right environment for us.”

 

It didn’t necessarily look that way coming into the Championship match. 

The team had seen a long list of key Seniors graduate the previous year, and knew they’d be starting with a much younger, less experienced roster. And, admits Senior Co-Captain Lyla Kocher, the powerhouse forward responsible for both of CA’s Championship-winning goals on top of a league-leading season total of 28, “It took us a sec to figure out how to help the team rebuild, how to guide them.”

 

But after racking up five tough losses through the first half of the spring, including a 1-0 defeat to Kent, says Kocher, “We started wanting it more. We started playing for each other more.”

Adds Senior Co-Captain Jenna Westfall, “We grew a lot after that Kent loss. We really took off as a team—we didn’t lose again the rest of the season.”

 

When the Mustangs lined up at the start of the Championship match against their biggest rival, the Sun Devils probably thought they were looking at the same team they had faced before, probably expecting the same outcome.

But that’s not how the CA girls saw it. 

“We went out there ready to win,” explains Kocher. “We knew that if we could just play our game, there’d be no issue with our opponent, no matter who it was.”

“Even if we believed we weren’t really the underdogs,” Westfall says, “we decided as a team to play like we were—like we had a chip on our shoulder, nothing to lose. We were going to leave it all on the field.”

 

The first half of the matchup certainly delivered on that resolve: Spectators were on the edge of their seats as the rivals staged a scoreless shoving match of physical, fast-paced soccer, with both teams at the top of their game.

According to Stedeford, “We knew Kent was going to bring a lot of energy to the fight. So before the game, we made sure the girls understood that we were going to fight back.”

 

After a few opening exchanges that put the Mustangs on their heels, continues Stedeford, “They settled in, and we started to find our own rhythm.” 

By the end of the first half, CA had started to turn the tables, and when they took the field for the second, they did so with a message from Coach: “The next 40 minutes aren’t going to require us to be a different team; they’re going to mean us staying true to what we do and how we want to play.”

There was stunned silence from the CA side of the stands when Kent was first to score just five minutes into the half—but it lasted only a second, as the goal seemed to kick the Mustangs into a higher gear. With an assist from Senior Layne Ballenger just a minute later, Kocher knocked in CA’s equalizing goal almost, it seemed, before Kent had finished celebrating their own.

 

Then, another three minutes in, Kocher was in front of the Sun Devils’ net again, preparing for a free kick after drawing a foul. The ball she curved around a wall of Kent defenders and through the arms of their keeper would seal the Mustangs’ win with 30 minutes left to play.

From that point on, the Mustangs simply shut out the Sun Devils. CA goalkeeper Junior Hannah Hyatt and star Sophomore defender and team Co-Captain Carys O’Hara were a brick wall against Kent’s frustrated front line, and Kocher and Westfall, leaders on offense, dropped back to help stop any attacks.  

 

“That Kent goal against us was a blessing in disguise—we had nothing to lose,” recounts Kocher. “The moment really unlocked how we wanted to play, and let us not be afraid.”

Adds Westfall, “We never felt defeated; everybody’s head was up, which was different from earlier in the season when we might have put our heads down at a time like that.”

As Stedeford explains, the team leaned into adversity, just as they had all season, growing stronger from one game to the next. “Instead of shying away, this became a team that wasn’t afraid to do hard things.”

Moving up to 5A next year will be another level of difficulty, he says. “But when we talk to the girls before a game, when it gets chaotic or it feels like we’re under it, we’ll tell them the same thing: Don’t look at the scoreboard. Look at each other.”

More State Championship Photos