Brawl Breaks Out at High School Girls' Soccer Game in Rhode Island

The high school girls' soccer state championships in Rhode Island turned violent this weekend when, with a minute left in the game between Woonsocket and Tolman, Woonsocket's Kristen Cahill and Tolman's Maria Lopera started pushing, shoving and punching each other. The violence then spilled over into the stands, where fans of the two teams came to blows.

WPRI in Providence quotes Woonsocket soccer coach Kathleen Fagnant saying she thinks Tolman players were upset that her team won 5-0:

"Frustrations are frustrations," said . "[Tolman was ] down five-nothing. We're both physical teams, and you can only take so much; at a certain point, someone snapped."

"I know I pride myself and my girls on sportsmanship. And not to put a blame on anybody, it could be us too, we could have been going back and forth," she said. "We had the advantage, and we had good spirits, so I'm not going to take the fall for that."

This is the second time in the last four days we've written about violence in women's soccer; University of New Mexico junior Elizabeth Lambert was suspended indefinitely after punching, pushing, kicking and pulling the hair of BYU players in a game last week. The good news is that in both cases, there were apparently no serious injuries: The worst thing to come of the Woonsocket-Tolman brawl was one soccer player with a black eye.

Video via Sports Rubbish.