If there's a quicker goal in the history of soccer, we don't know about it. On the opening kick, a Georgia high school player received the ball in his own end – and the ball didn't touch the ground again until it crashed into the back of the net, 67 yards away.
Coming within seconds of the referee's whistle to start play, the epic score drew surprised yells from the crowd. A video of the moon-shot is rapidly picking up viewers on YouTube; it was first posted last week by Bill Phelps. CBS Sports wrote about the long score this morning.
It's fairly easy to calculate the yardage in this case, because the game at Harrison High School in Kennesaw, Ga., about 30 minutes northwest of Atlanta, was being played on a football field.
That's where the right foot of Andrew Deltac met the ball on the 43 yard-line and blasted it over the goalie's head for the game's first score.
The goal was set up at the rear of the end zone, which is 10 yards deep. The ball soared through the night air and over the head of the goalie, who had been caught out near the top of the penalty area.
Here's how Phelps describes the video: "67 yard goal scored by Harrison High School's Andrew Deltac off the opening kick off! Recorded by Michelle Daley."
Phelps says the score is the farthest and quickest ever recorded at Harrison. It came at the start of the team's Feb. 18 game against Walton High School of nearby Marietta, he says.
Deltac is a junior on the team at Harrison. A look at the soccer team's website suggests Harrison is a perennial playoff team. Both its boys and girls teams have won state championships.
We don't have many more details than that, including who won the game.
"It's like Deltac here Keyser Sozed the entire Internet," writes Bleacher Report's Gabe Zaldivar, "coming in for one flash of brilliance and then disappearing into anonymity once again perhaps to one day return and embarrass any would-be foolish goalkeepers."
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