Paul Laurence Dunbar having a blast as girls soccer contender this season
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- Dunbar girls soccer notched 13 shutouts under first-year coach Jeff Stone
- Top playoff seed hinges on Wednesday's matchup against No. 2 Lexington Catholic
- Junior-heavy roster drives Dunbar's best season since 2018 regional title run
First-year Paul Laurence Dunbar girls soccer coach Jeff Stone drew up some goals for his Bulldogs ahead of the season.
They eclipsed the goal of 10 shutout games earlier this month and padded that total to 13 with a 4-0 win at 43rd District rival Lafayette on Monday night.
“Even though our defense at times is not where I still want it to be,” Stone said, ‘they have done a great job with that.”
Their goal of winning their district will prove tougher.
The 43rd is also home to No. 2 Lexington Catholic (14-2-1, 3-0). The two meet at 7:45 p.m. Wednesday at Dunbar to decide who will claim the district’s top playoff seed.
Dunbar (12-2-1, 3-0) has only beaten the Knights three times in 39 meetings over the past 25 years.
It’s a daunting task, even for a team ranked No. 19 in the new Rundell Rankings computer ratings.
“If you figure that one out, will you let me know?” Stone joked about beating LexCath. “Because Coach (Terry) Quigley has done an unbelievable job over there, and they just continue to have the best players in the city. Every year, somebody thinks they have a shot, and it turns out they don’t. So, we’ll just keep trying.”
Bulldogs growing into a contender
Regardless of Wednesday’s outcome, Stone has the Bulldogs on track for their best season in years. Even a No. 2 seed in the district playoffs would be a leg up on Dunbar making its first district finals and region tournament appearance since it won the region in 2018, when now-assistant coach Audrey Rawls was a senior.
“It’s super exciting, because we’ve truly never been this strong in our ranking and our record,” said junior midfielder Kennedy Morgan, who scored Dunbar’s second goal against Lafayette on Monday with a perfect, top-shelf header off a corner kick late in the first half. “It is a little nerve-wracking because a lot of teams do want to knock us down, but I think we build off that. We have a fun chemistry on the team.”
That camaraderie helped keep fellow junior Layla Flynn on the pitch. Her primary sport is basketball, where she led the Bulldogs with 14.8 points per game last season. Flynn and some of her closest friends endured disappointing early playoff exits in both her freshman and sophomore years. She hopes this year is different.
“I’m having fun, like, so much fun,” said Flynn, who got an assist Monday when her pass into the 6 was struck home by Emerson Stone for a 1-0 lead. “Soccer gives me the perfect balance. Doing basketball, especially high school and then AAU, takes up most of my time, so I like having soccer.”
Stone, a longtime Dunbar boys assistant under former coach Todd Bretz, took over a girls program that includes daughters Mackenzie and Emerson, a junior and freshman, respectively. The team has just two seniors, but a strong junior class of 10 players.
“I’ve just been very blessed with having a strong group of juniors to lead the way and a really hungry freshman class, which is pretty much driving the older kids to push themselves to be better each day,” Stone said.
Freshman Sophie Griffith scored two second half goals from atop the 18-yard box against Lafayette to set the game’s final margin.
Lessons learned in midseason tournament losses
But the group got a hard look at some elite teams last week in Lexington Catholic’s annual Lady Knights Challenge Cup, where it suffered its only losses so far — a 3-0 defeat to No. 5 Simon Kenton and 4-0 setback against No. 15 Elizabethtown. Lexington Catholic beat E-Town 4-0 earlier in the event.
“It showed us where we truly need to get to and how much work we really need to do before we get to the postseason,” Morgan said. “The teams we face later on, we really have to get up to their standards.”
Toppling Lexington Catholic is not impossible. Madison Central stunned the then-No. 1 Knights in the 2023 region finals. Dunbar is the last Lexington rival to knock off LexCath in the regular season, way back in 2019.
Stone noted the Bulldogs’ continued success depends on them, regardless of their opponent.
“We said we didn’t care who was on the front of the jersey, we wanted to come out and win each game,” Stone said. “Our motto has been ‘Every moment matters,’ and we’re trying to live by that as much as possible.”
This story was originally published September 16, 2025 at 9:01 AM.
