PUKALANI – For the first time in four years, the girls soccer team will be advancing to the HHSAA state championships as Maui Interscholastic League champions.

“This feeling [of becoming MIL champs] is everything you join a sport for,” Head Coach Steven Mau said.

The Warriors defeated their opponents, the Maui High Sabers, for the first place spot among the MIL Division I schools in tonight’s game at Kana’iaupuni Stadium,.

The score was 1-0, with the only goal of the game being scored by sophomore striker Moana Astronomo within 35 minutes of the first half.

This game was also the last MIL game for the seven seniors on the team. Fans and parents filled and decorated the stands for Senior Night.

“I’m happy for the girls,” Coach Mau said. “This is what they played and trained for the entire season.”

From the beginning of the season, the team has made major improvements, and it shows in their playing, according to senior defender Kalia Tamashiro.

“[In the beginning,] it was kind of slow, because we didn’t know how to work with each other,” she said. “Now we’ve learned how to kind of gel together.”

However, the girls still need to work on “getting the ball in the back of the net,” Coach Mau said.

Now, senior midfielder Kaylee Correa said, the girls will need to work on their focus while training for the Outrigger Hotels and Resorts Girls Soccer Championships being held at Waipio Peninsula Soccer Park on Oʻahu, January 30-February 2.

“The feeling of being MIL champs and going to states could get distracting,” Correa said. “We just need to have discipline.”

The senior girls have competed  twice more in the past four years, in 2011 and 2012 as second-place finishers in the MIL.

This year, the league champions will be joined by King Kekaulike’s Nā Ali’i, who will be the second place team going to the 2013 tournament.