Despite being the only sport at St. Michael Catholic School to move up a classification this year, the Lady Cardinals soccer team will compete for a state championship for the third year in a row.

They’ll do so on the back of eighth-grader Abigail Smeraglia, who achieved a hat trick to lead the Cardinals to a 4-1 victory over Indian Springs on Wednesday in the Class 5A semifinal matchup at John Hunt Park in Huntsville.

The Cardinals (18-2-4) took the lead early with Smeraglia’s first goal at the 5:11 mark of the first half, which came on a penalty kick. About 10 minutes later, Indian Springs’ Ashma Mehra tied the match at 15:03.

That’s how the match stood until the second half when Smeraglia, who leads the team with 29 goals, completed her hat trick during a 20-minute stretch on assists from Nora Montgomery and Francheska Arellano. St. Michael’s final goal of extra insurance came from Caroline Callaham with 11 minutes remaining.

Cardinal keeper Reagan Gregory had four saves, and Indian Springs’ keeper marked 10.

“The confidence,” head coach Brian Daughtery said Wednesday afternoon on what helped boost the team to pull away in the second half. “The big thing with this team is we lost 10 players from last year; seven starters, seven seniors.”

This year, over half of the roster is seventh- and eighth-graders.

“They play for each other. Their skill. A lot of times, their inexperience turns out,” Daughtery said. "We had a very good Indian Springs team. They won the state championship in 2022,” he said. “They had a very nice team, and we were fortunate we were able to come out on top.”

He said he knew the program would make it back to the Final Four but that he didn’t think it would be the very next year after being bumped up to 5A from 4A.

Private schools in Alabama, in addition to a 1.35 enrollment multiplier, are subject to a sport-specific Competitive Balance Factor, which was adopted in 2021 and aims to create a more even playing field by adjusting the classification of private school teams based on their postseason success over the past two years.

Teams earn points based on their postseason performance — single sports, like football, require a higher point threshold than co-ed sports, like soccer, to move up in classification — and teams that accumulate enough points based on their postseason success are moved up.

For the 2025 and 2026 seasons, the soccer teams at St. Michael are the only ones to compete in Class 5A; the rest of the school is classified as 4A.

The Lady Cardinals may have moved up a classification, but so did the two-time reigning state champs in their old class. They lost to Westminster Christian the last two years, and they’ll once again face them this year after the Wildcats edged Springville 1-0 in a match that was scoreless through 40 minutes of regulation play and 10 more minutes through two overtime periods. The teams then moved to shots from the mark with five players on each side.

They tied 3-3 in the first series.

In the second series, both teams missed on their first try, but Westminster’s keeper came up with a save on Springville’s second try, and Wildcat Annie Collier then settled the marathon with a kick on goal for the win.

Springville, the 2024 state champion for 5A, finished the match with 12 shots on goal in regulation and the two OTs. Westminster had eight shots on goal during that same span.

Though half of the roster is in middle school, Daughtery said there are “a few holdovers” who have been on the team for three or more years and have faced the Wildcats the last two. One of them is senior Francheska Arellano, a Columbia State signee who marked an assist on Wednesday morning. Daughtery said she is the backbone of the team.

“She controls the midfield,” he said.

He said all credit goes to the girls because they bought into the process and put in the work this year.

“They want it,” he said of Friday’s state championship rematch. “…When they saw they [Westminster] won…they’re excited, and that’s who they want to play in the finals.”