ALTON – For the fourth consecutive time, Alton bleeds blue.
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The Alton Redbirds and Marquette Catholic Explorers boys soccer programs met on a hot Saturday night at Public School Stadium to settle the score.
It was another big win for Marquette, beating Alton 4-1.
The teams met twice last season, once in the championship game of the Redbird Tournament, a 4-1 win for Marquette, and again in mid-September, a 5-1 win for the Explorers.
The Explorers are 13-3-2 against the Redbirds dating back to 2003. They are 5-1 in the series since the two have been playing regularly again since 2021.
The Redbirds have now been outscored by their crosstown rivals 15-2 in the last four games. Alton last won the rivalry match in 2022, a 2-1 win.
Marquette led 1-0 at halftime and eventually led 4-0 before the Redbirds scored on a corner kick with 40 seconds left in the game to get to the final of 4-1.
“It was a good game,” Alton head coach Greg Nasello said. “The problem is, you’ve got to finish your chances. It should’ve been 1-0 eight minutes into the game. We’re good on set plays, as we showed at the end. If you’re [leading] 1-0 there, it changes the whole complexity of the game.”
After Diego Lara’s shot was saved in the third minute and Gus Koeller’s attempt was just high in the sixth minute, Alton had their first chance.
The chance Nasello is referring to was a shot from Max Reedy that got deflected out for a corner. The corner kick eventually fizzled out, and Alton walked away empty-handed.
“They’re too good athletically, they’re too good of soccer players, so you cannot give them that chance; and I think that’s what we did,” Nasello said. “We had a chance to get the game early, and when we didn’t, now we’re chasing the game, and that hurt us.”
Alton continued to have chances throughout the first half.
Blake Rensing had a cross that turned out to be more of a shot go high across the face of goal in the 13th minute. In the 18th minute, the Redbirds won a free kick right outside the 18-yard box. Rensing elected to cross, and Benny Helfrich nearly tapped it in at the back post, but didn’t get all of it, allowing Marquette keeper Chase Kopp to get down in time and make the save.
Cameron Golike immediately went the other way and had his shot saved out for a corner by Patrick Henesy. On the ensuing corner, a Marquette player got up to head the ball on net, and it would have gone in if not for Deacon Alm’s goal-line headed clearance.
That was just the first 20 minutes.
After the teams came out of the mandatory halfway water break, things slowed down a bit. For such a hot evening, 89 degrees at kickoff, neither side went to their bench in the first 20 minutes or the rest of the first half, really, for that matter.
Finally, in the 27th minute, the game saw its first goal. Eli Baggio was left open with tons of space, so he curled a left-footed shot into the bottom left corner from about 20 yards out and made Alton pay.
The Explorers took that lead into halftime.
They thought they doubled that lead early on in the second half, but the goal was controversially ruled offside.
Marquette would get that goal soon enough.
In the 57th minute, Golike won a penalty kick, being fouled by Alm. Alm was the last man back and was given a yellow for the tackle and a little bit of shirt pulling.
Chris Hankins stepped up to the spot and buried the PK to make it 2-0. Less than a minute later, Maicol Gonzalez got the ball after an Alton turnover in defense, and he poked it past Henesy to make it three.
Golike would find his way onto the scoresheet in the 77th minute when he had a nice turn and finish into the bottom corner to make it 4-0.
The Redbirds avoided the shutout when Rensing scored from a corner kick with 40 seconds left to get to the final score.
“It was a good fight, but when you’re chasing the game, and down two, now you’ve got to find a goal,” Nasello said. “That’s part of it. You’ve got to take that risk. We wanted to find a way to get into the game as much as we could. Unfortunately, it took until the last minute to find that goal.”
The Redbirds, who have come from behind multiple times this season, have a certain ‘never say die’ attitude, and it showed on Saturday.
“We didn’t quit,” Nasello said proudly. “We scored the last goal. That’s how we always are; we keep coming.”
Alton falls to 4-4 on the season and will play next at Edwardsville on Tuesday, September 16.
The Explorers improve to 7-3, bouncing back from a 3-0 loss against Father McGivney from Thursday.
“I was really preaching after the other day that when we have the opportunity to make a play, we have to make a play. I thought we did that,” Marquette head coach Brian Hoener said.
“And I thought there were times in the game where we had a little more energy, especially there in the second half. It was a really good response and a really good result for us. Alton’s a good team. They battled; they played hard, very well coached. We knew it was going to be tough.”
One of Marquette’s biggest concerns heading into this season was where its goals were going to come from. The Explorers graduated their two leading goal scorers, Quin Copeland (22 goals) and Jude Keller (15 goals, 10 assists), but scoring goals in 2025 hasn’t been that big of a problem.
In the seven games they’ve won so far, they’ve outscored their opposition 33-4.
And those goals are coming from everyone. Golike leads the team with 10, but he’s just one of 13 players who’ve found the back of the net thus far.
“There’s going to be some games where we’re frustrated and don’t score many,” Hoener said. “But we’re going to create them; it’s whether or not we finish them. And tonight I thought we did a pretty good job of finishing them.”
In comparison to previous seasons, Marquette is off to a slow start, starting off 11-2 last year and 9-1-1 the year before that, but 7-3 is still great.
“We play a difficult schedule,” Hoener said. “We have four freshmen that are in our starting lineup, so we knew it was going to take some time to figure out who we are, and I think we’re starting to figure it out.”
The Explorers will be back in action on Monday, September 15, at Granite City.
