St. James boys soccer routs Myrtle Beach, to play for state title

Making all this history is secondary to Drew Pavy.

Doing it in such impressive fashion? The St. James boys soccer coach is just fine with that.

Following the lead of freshman Luke Williams’ hat trick and two goals from Quadarius Grate, the Sharks defeated Region VII-AAA rival Myrtle Beach 5-1 in the Lower State finals on Tuesday at Doug Shaw Memorial Stadium. The win pushes St. James to their first-ever state championship appearance.

“I don’t look at numbers. I don’t look at stats. I look at right now,” said Pavy, himself a 2008 St. James graduate. “And right now, we’re playing at our top level.”

The exclamation point the Sharks put on their run through the Lower State bracket legitimizes that.

A team that had just three postseason victories in its first 11 years has won four in the last eight days alone. The latest means the Sharks will be facing A.C. Flora, the Upper State winner, on Saturday at River Bluff High School outside Columbia.

It will be the sixth time a boys team from Horry County has ever played for a soccer championship, with the previous five (three from Myrtle Beach, two from Socastee) resulting in losses.

But that’s another hurdle after St. James has already cleared so many others.

Since the South Carolina High School League instituted its Nos. 1-4 seeding process for boys soccer for the 2008-2009 school year, only top seeds had reached the finals from either the Lower or Upper State brackets. The Sharks were a No. 2, courtesy of a tiebreaker scenario that gave the No. 1 seed to Myrtle Beach after the last meeting between the two.

That may only be a technicality, as St. James was ranked No. 1 in the state polls for several weeks earlier this year.

Just the same, it seems like months ago that the Seahawks clinched the region title with a 2-0 victory over the Sharks. After that loss, St. James senior goalie Haywood Brandon sat on the Doug Shaw turf with tears of disappointment.

This time, he and the rest of the Sharks were all smiles.

“It’s the best soccer I’ve ever seen, period,” Brandon said. “It’s mind-blowing to see how much the young players have stepped up. [Grate] has played phenomenal. Defense has played phenomenal. I can’t put into words how great it has been to watch us all play together.”

Williams’ first two goals gave the Sharks a 2-0 halftime lead. Grate then sandwiched his two scores around assisting Williams’ third.

The three second-half strikes came inside a span of 10 minutes.

“Their finishing tonight, overall, was pretty impressive,” Myrtle Beach coach Jason Himmelsbach said. “The first half, I thought we needed a spark after their first goal, which we never really got. It never allowed us to get into our rhythm offensively. The second half, coming out of the break, we had to push for it, down 2-0 with no momentum.”

The Sharks’ used that to earn their biggest win of the season to date and continued what has already been a dynamic year.

Grate was selected to the Clash of the Carolinas All-Star roster while teammate Joey Simpson was named to the North-South All-Star team. Both were also named the Class AAA All-State team earlier this week. There was that No. 1 state ranking, the first-ever home playoff game and a wild trek on Friday and Saturday of last week that resulted in roughly 15 hours of travel and two playoff wins in the span of about 35 total hours.

All of that, however, will pale in comparison to one more St. James victory.

This story was originally published May 12, 2015 at 10:00 PM with the headline "St. James boys soccer routs Myrtle Beach, to play for state title."