Staff photo / Preston Byers Niles forward Kherington Stanford (5) and Lakeview’s Siena Sutliff (12) battle for the ball during Monday’s Niles win at Bo Rein Stadium.

By PRESTON BYERS

Staff writer

NILES — With the top spot in the Northeast 8 Conference at stake, the only two teams without a loss in league play met Monday evening, when Lakeview visited Bo Rein Stadium to face Niles.

The last time the Red Dragons took the pitch before Monday, they finished in a 1-1 draw with Girard, which snapped the seven-match win streak Niles had built to open the season.

The start of a new week, though, spawned the potential start of a new streak for the Dragons, who dominated possession and whose Kherington Stanford capitalized on more than a few chances to defeat the Bulldogs 6-1 and extended the program’s longest undefeated stretch to begin a season in at least a decade.

“I’m very proud of the girls,” Niles head coach Scott MacMillan said. “They showed up tonight, they shared the ball. It was a team effort all the way around. … The girls fed some great balls, played amazing defense. We had one small breakdown, but outside of that, great team effort against a really great team that’s well-coached.”

Nearing the halfway point of the conference slate, neither Niles nor Lakeview had allowed an NE8 opponent to score more than once against them. However, the Bulldogs had not yet dealt with the offensive firepower of the Dragons, who averaged more than seven goals scored in six league matches.

The difficulty of containing the Niles attack quickly became evident, as Lakeview, which rarely controlled the ball, spent most of the first half chasing Stanford and Madelyn Yost, Niles’s leading goal scorers.

While neither of the Dragon stars managed to break the scoreless tie in the first 20 minutes, shortly after a corner kick, the ball found Stanford in the center of the field. The forward took a pass on her right foot and immediately rifled it into the top-left corner of the net for her first goal of the match.

Stanford added to her season goal total in the final 10 minutes of the half, when she gained position at the top of the box and floated a ball over the outstretched hands of Lakeview goalkeeper Emilee Dotts.

“It’s just to get you ready for tournament time,” Lakeview coach Heather Sferra said of defending Stanford and Yost. “Those girls aren’t gonna go away, and you could see them again — and we are gonna see Niles later on this season. But every team’s gonna have those couple girls that we just have to decide how are we gonna lock them down and what’s gonna shut down so they can’t get shots off.”

Following halftime, the Bulldogs wrangled possession away from the Dragons much more consistently, with MaKenna Doran, in particular, applying pressure on the Niles backline.

Many of the Lakeview attacks came up empty, however, while Stanford continued her assault on the Bulldogs’ defense.

Less than seven minutes into the second half, Stanford completed her hat trick by finishing a one-on-one against Dotts. Five and a half minutes later, Stanford used her left foot to put Niles ahead 4-0. Within three minutes, Stanford again scored with her left foot.

With just under 20 minutes to go, Lakeview avoided being shut out for the first time in 2025.

After a prolonged Bulldogs attack around the Niles net, Aurora Hall gained possession of the ball in the box and slipped it past Dragons keeper Grace Guarinieri.

Shortly thereafter, Stanford, who entered Monday’s match with a team-best 24 goals, scored her sixth of the match and 30th of the season with a left-foot roller into the bottom right corner of the net.

“She has most of the goals, but she should. She is my center striker,” MacMillan said of Stanford. “She’s very, very relaxed on the ball, she doesn’t panic. But she can’t do without the other girls getting her the ball. The work of the midfield and the defense is how that success happens because when you depossess another team in the midfield and you play a ball to somebody’s feet — she finished some great balls, that’s her job — but those girls playing those balls to her feet, that was music tonight. It was a beautiful game.”

With the win, Niles improved to 8-0-1 on the season and 6-0-1 in the NE8, which is the Dragons’ to lose with five league matches remaining. They next play on Saturday against Champion in a non-conference matchup.

Lakeview (6-2-1, 4-1-1) will try to rebound and pick up its fifth NE8 win on Thursday at home against South Range.