This article has been corrected.

For most of the teams in the 2014 DODDS-Europe Division I boys and girls soccer tournaments, Tuesday’s first-day slate of games was an arduous, exhausting slog through hours of hard-fought competition.

For another, not so much.

The top-seeded Ramstein boys teams cashed in on a supremely favorable tournament draw, earning the spring’s first semifinal berth by virtue of a 4-0 win over Vilseck in its only game of the day.

While the Royals cruised into the elimination round, the rest of the large-school field remains locked in combat to extend their respective seasons.

Girls

Patch 3, Lakenheath 0: Though they’re the defending champions, the Panthers are taking nothing for granted. Just ask senior forward Lauren Rittenhouse.

“I would like to win the title again,” Rittenhouse said. “But you never know what’s going to happen.”

That was particularly true as the Panthers got off to a slow start against an unfamiliar Lancers squad.

“Everyone was a little nervous,” Rittenhouse said. “So in the first half, we were all jumpy and it wasn’t very good.”

But Patch settled down, thanks in large part to the two goals Rittenhouse scored. The third was a sister-to-sister connection as Whitney Mannier assisted a Danielle Mannier goal.

Regardless of their come-what-may approach to the tournament, the Panthers were arguably the day’s most dominant outfit. The defending champs finished off their Tuesday workload with a 3-0 win over fifth-seeded Wiesbaden.

Ramstein 1, Kaiserslautern 0: The Raider dream just keeps getting deferred.

Another maddeningly narrow loss to archrival Ramstein on Tuesday denied Kaiserslautern its long-awaited breakthrough against the Royals. The Raiders lost to Ramstein 2-0 in last year’s tournament and 1-0 in the 2014 regular season.

But Kaiserslautern believes its moment is coming.

“I think we have a chance, if we make it to the championship, to beat them,” said Raider midfielder Ariana Osmar, who scored four goals in the Raiders’ tournament-opening 5-0 defeat of Vilseck earlier Tuesday. “We find out new things they do differently each time we play them.”

Kaiserslautern nearly solved the puzzle Tuesday. The Raiders had multiple shots on goal in the game’s last 10 minutes, each of which would have forced a tie. But they were rebuffed each time.

Ramstein was also denied on most of its trips downfield. But senior Hunter Pace got one through to give the Royals the lead, and eventually, the game.

It was the second scare of the day for top-seeded Ramstein, which edged Wiesbaden 2-1 earlier Tuesday. Still, the two wins keep it even with second-seeded Patch in the round-robin race to Thursday’s final. The annual rivals are the only teams to escape Tuesday without a loss.

Boys

Wiesbaden 0, Kaiserslautern 0: The Raiders and Warriors continued a regular-season trend of low-scoring, evenly-matched games by playing to a scoreless tie.

In such an environment, Warrior defenseman and recent Heidelberg transfer Daniel White said the pressure is on each team’s back line to avoid making a mistake that might give an otherwise stymied offense an opportunity.

“There are some plays where if I don’t talk to my other center-back, it can get messed up and then the guy will get through,” White said. “If our offense can’t score and we get scored on, and then we just maintain that, then we lose.”

White’s words would prove prophetic later. International School of Brussels managed two goals against the Warriors, and the Wiesbaden offense remained punchless in a 2-0 loss.

ISB, in the odd position of being defending champion and the tournament’s lowest seed, lost to Patch 5-0 in its other game Tuesday. Kaiserslautern’s late 2-1 win over Patch means all four teams - Kaiserslautern, Patch, Wiesbaden, and ISB - remain in the mix for a semifinal spot out of the muddled four-team pool. They’ll settle the issue Wednesday morning, with the semifinals following Wednesday evening.

Ramstein 4, Vilseck 0: The road to the semifinals was laid out nicely for the Royals, and they happily skipped along it.

As the tournament’s top seed, Ramstein landed in a three-team pool alongside No. 4 Lakenheath and No. 5 Vilseck. The Royals had just one game scheduled for Tuesday, an afternoon date with Vilseck.

As the Lancers and Falcons played to a 1-1 tie Tuesday morning, the Royals needed only knock off Vilseck to clinch its berth in Wednesday evening’s semifinal round. They did so with ease, making Wednesday’s second pool play game against the Lancers functionally irrelevant for the Royals.

That doesn’t mean they don’t have cause for motivation.

“We have to bring everything we have tomorrow,” Ramstein defender Troy Guffey said. “Whoever we play in the semifinals, we’ve got to intimidate them.”

Guffey and several of his senior teammates have added incentive to bring home a title. The group won a championship in their freshman season, but have been denied another title over the last two years.

“We just want to go out with a bang,” Guffey said.

broome.gregory@stripes.com

Twitter: @broomestripes

Correction Kaiserslautern's Jasmin Przysucha was misidentified in an earlier version of this article.

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