4A boys championship: St. Pius comes full circle with win over Academy

There were 13 of them on this field a year ago, none of whom did anything particularly egregious to have earned the heartache they felt.

But on Saturday morning, the St. Pius Sartans — including those aforementioned 13 players — rewrote the ending, and won another boys soccer state championship.

The No. 1 seed in the Class 4A tournament completed a brilliant season, scoring a pair of goals midway through the first half, and riding that quick burst to a 2-0 victory in the final over third-seeded Albuquerque Academy at the University of New Mexico Soccer Complex.

“It’s very satisfying when you beat your rival, right?” Sartans coach A.J. Herrera said. “I call it a healthy hatred.”

It was Academy, 52 weeks earlier, who left UNM with a blue trophy following a shootout victory over St. Pius. That loss in PKs definitely left in its wake some scar tissue.

The Sartans (19-1-2) had 13 players from that team returning this year, and they fairly bulldozed their way through the 4A division this fall — their single loss came outside their own class, to Class 5A’s Sandia — and gained some vindication against the Chargers (14-6-3),

“It feels like closure,” said St. Pius forward Mateo Certain. “Especially as a senior, to finally get on top again. … When we started preseason in June, we put it behind us, and we set our focus on today and we got it done.”

St. Pius has 19 state championships, behind only Sandia Prep — with 21 — for New Mexico’s all-time lead.

The Sartans won nine of their final 10 games by shutout.

“Our chem(istry) has been outstanding,” said junior forward Nico Reyes, St. Pius’ leading scorer. “Once we are playing together, we are the best team in the state. And that is a fact.”

It was a Sartan at the other end of the scoring spectrum that got the scoring started for St. Pius.

Lengthy sophomore defender Christopher Justus got his head on a corner kick from teammate Diego Herrera (son of the head coach), and put it home from about a yard away in the 17th minute.

Later, Justus offered a memorable quote as he reflected on this win.

“It’s a fantasy, dude,” he said, smiling. “I’m in a dream right now.”

The Sartans had been angling to find a way to get the ball onto Justus’ head. It was just his third goal of the season.

“This entire year,” coach Herrera said, “we have been working on finding him on that corner, trying to free up CJ because he’s a beast in the air.”

Senior forward Ethan Wright, just three minutes later, doubled St. Pius’ lead, moving forward in transition, and finding a great angle for a low shot (faking with his left, shooting with his right) into the low far corner in the 20th minute.

“I was so bummed about last year. It was a hard loss,” Wright said. “We came back this year, and every single one of those boys has that great work ethic, that great heart, and we all played for each other.”

The Sartans, who outshot Academy 14-10 overall, excelled at finishing. St. Pius brought back a good bit of its offensive firepower this season, and the Sartans, Herrera said, “were scoring goals like crazy this year. Teams were having problems keeping us out of the net.”

But St. Pius did have to largely rebuild on the back end, and four of its five, including goalkeeper (senior David Bunnell had six saves Saturday), were new faces in the starting lineup and gradually found their collective footing after a somewhat up-and-down first half of the season.

And while the Sartans don’t graduate many players from this team, on Saturday, they had this moment in the sun.

The full circle moment was described this way by Reyes:

“It was very heartbreaking (last year),” he said. “But now we have the blue trophy.”

Moments from 2025 boys state soccer finals