Soccer season in Warren County, for all intents and purposes, ended in a span of about four hours on Tuesday night. Watching our local teams go down in the first round of the playoffs was like seeing the Jedis wiped out after Emperor Palpatine issued Order 66.

Grenada 7, Vicksburg 0.

Northwest Rankin 6, Warren Central 0.

Germantown 6, Vicksburg 0.

Northwest Rankin 3, Warren Central 0.

St. Aloysius and Porters Chapel still have a month left in their seasons, and St. Al’s boys team could very well win the MAIS Class AAA championship.

Among Vicksburg’s public high schools, however, the first-round decimation is a scene that has become all too common. None of the four local teams has won a first-round game since 2010.

It didn’t always used to be that way. Vicksburg’s girls won five state championships between 1996 and 2002, when girls’ soccer was in its infancy in Mississippi. Vicksburg’s boys’ team got to the state championship game in 2005.

Heck, Warren Central’s boys’ squad is still good. It went 13-4 this year and is 39-14-4 over the last three seasons

So what happened? Why can’t Vicksburg and Warren Central seem to win a playoff game anymore, let alone make a run at a championship?

The answers are big and complex, but in essence boil down to talent and depth. We have some talented soccer players in town, but not enough of them. Warren Central’s teams were competitive against Northwest Rankin — whose boys and girls teams are both ranked No. 1 in Mississippi — but eventually ran out of gas as waves of speedy substitutes ran them into the ground over the course of 80 minutes.

Vicksburg High has some talented scorers in Mikayla Banks and Greg Hayden, but Grenada and Germantown have three or four players just as good.

Vicksburg used to have a strong club program that churned out high-level players, but enthusiasm for it petered out around the same time programs in Rankin, Madison and Hinds counties caught up. Recent efforts to revive it have essentially been starting at ground zero and will take time to show results.

The high school coaches have a plan.. Until there’s a steady flow of talented players and not just a few at a time, however, it’s going to be tough for them to be contenders on a consistent basis.

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Ernest Bowker is a sports writer for The Vicksburg Post. He can be reached at ernest.bowker@vicksburgpost.com