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Girls Soccer: Cornacchio Has Career to Remember

All-American Briarcliff grad is ready to take her soccer game to Princeton.

If you were looking for one word to describe recent graduate Liana Cornacchio’s pre-college soccer career, that word might be legendary.

Cornacchio, who started on the varsity squad all four years in high school, was a star player on three state Class B championship squads her freshman, sophomore and junior years.

She earned state tournament MVP honors her freshman and junior years, as well as all-section and all-state honors in each of her four years at Briarcliff.

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Cornacchio, a forward, also showed she has the brains and the brawn, as she was named a Con Ed Scholar Athlete Award winner in her senior campaign.

Then if that weren’t enough, she earned high school All-American honors from the National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) in 2009 and 2010 and helped her Syosset Sting club team to seven New York State Cup championships, two Region I titles and a national finalist spot in 2010.

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With all that she has accomplished, it’s easy to see why she will be playing at Princeton University this fall, a school that's had its eye on Cornacchio for the last four years.

“One of their assistant coaches actually came to one of my games my freshman year,” Cornacchio said. “Back then, I didn’t think anything like this was even possible.”

But it was and now Cornacchio will be playing at the New Jersey-based school. She said one of the biggest factors in deciding on playing for the Tigers was their style of play.

“I would consider myself fast, but that’s not my game,” Cornacchio explained. “Their style of play involves using headers, volleys and crosses—and that is the type of game I like to play.”

Cornacchio said she is now looking forward to the challenge of playing at the highest level of the NCAA, Division I. She knows now that for the first time in her in life she isn’t going to have an automatic spot in the starting lineup, but she is OK with that.

“I am looking forward to playing at Princeton,” Cornacchio said. “I know that I am going to have to prove myself all over again. I am ready for the extra training I will have to do, having practices twice a day and juggling the academics along with the athletics. But that’s one of the reasons I wanted to go there, because I want that challenge.”

One of the things that made her ready for the challenge she said is her club coach, Rachael Safirstein, a standout player herself when she played at the University of Texas, who has coached Cornacchio for the last 11 years.

Safirstein first coached Cornacchio for the FC Sting before they merged with Syosset. After that, Safirstein continued to coach Cornacchio on her own.

“It was never a matter of whether she was going to continue to coach me or not,” Cornacchio said. “She has taught me everything about the game of soccer that I know. I owe everything that I have accomplished in soccer to her.”

As for her legendary run with Briarcliff, she said that it could never have happened without the group of players that she came into BHS with her freshman year. Twins Brianna and Savina Reid, Danielle Christiano and Madison Kittay, along with Cornacchio, made up a fivesome that knew what each other was doing as soon as they woke up in the morning.

“We just had a chemistry with each other that you couldn’t teach,” Cornacchio said. “We knew where each other were going to be on the field without even looking. You can teach someone plays but you can’t teach them chemistry. You either have that or you don’t and we did.”

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