Correspondent photo / Robert Hayes. Boardman’s Ava Acevado (right) takes the ball down the pitch with Harding’s Nicoletta Buydos (left) in pursuit on Wednesday in Warren. The Raiders won the match 4-1.

WARREN — It was certainly a tale of two halves.

While Boardman seemed to control the offensive flow of the match during the first half, once Warren G. Harding found the scoreboard to break the 0-0 deadlock in the second half, the game heavily fell into the favor of the host Raiders.

Harding (2-5-1) would go on to defeat the Spartans (1-7-1) by a score of 4-1 after a barrage of four consecutive goals, highlighted by Harding junior Josellen O’Brien’s first career multi-goal outing.

“The AAC is tough all around, Canfield, Howland, with Boardman, Austintown and us, it’s always high-intensity everywhere you go. Everywhere you go, the student sections always represent, and I feel like our guys up there from the football and soccer team really helped get the girls through the first half and power them through the second half,” Harding coach Kevin Brown said. “We lost our leading goal-scorer this year due to an ACL injury, and I’ve been telling everybody that we need to step up as a team. It’s not just one person.

“How we played before — we had one striker and we’d feed her the ball and try and get a drop or a shot. But I said hey, she’s not here, so we got to play a little bit smarter and change our style of play and we’re slowly starting to do that.”

O’Brien cashed in on the net twice, tallying Harding’s third and fourth goals of the evening in the second half.

“Honestly, in the first half we held them really good, and I think that’s what really kept our energy up. When we see each other playing good and we’re holding that 0-0, it keeps our energy up because we know we’re still fighting in the game,” O’Brien said. “Once we scored that first goal, we saw each other’s energy go up, we just built off of that and kept scoring.”

On a kick that was scored from a fair distance, O’Brien was greeted with a big hug and smile from fellow captain Haley Brown.

The feeling of a multi-goal match finally came to fruition for the junior while increasing Harding’s lead to 4-0 with just over 30 minutes left on the second half clock.

“I’m really happy, I’m really proud of myself. I stayed contained and tried to build off of my teammates as much as possible. I just think that Haley encouraged me to take as many shots as possible and she’s one of the reasons that I got that multi-goal game today,” O’Brien said. “Once we get to 2-0 we know that we have a little bit of a cushion. We cannot slow down. But we can stay more composed, we can build more, we can build out of the back, we don’t have to rush it, (and) we can just trust each other and keep moving forward.”

Brown, a senior, started the scoring bombardment within the first two minutes of the second half, clearing an open-net goal to break the 0-0 deadlock.

“We’re a second-half team, so we know that we had to pick up the pace in the second half. I wanted to win, so I knew that we had to step up and I got that first goal,” Brown said. “I wasn’t going at my full potential (in the first half), so I feel like I took a breath and told myself that I know that I can do this, so I went and did it.”

Senior Elaina Buydos scored the Raiders’ second goal, while senior goalkeeper Julia Logan tallied seven saves for Harding.

Just under the 20-minute mark, Boardman did reply by way of a goal by Jaelyn Cicchilo, but ultimately wasn’t able to continue to chip into the Raiders’ lead. With the dust settled, Kevin Brown sees encouraging play to build from.

“(Junior) Nae’Jon Moore puts pressure on the keeper from distance, Elaina can score from distance, Josellan if she needs to,” Kevin Brown said. “We have five or six girls that can put the ball in the back of the net when they get the confidence.”