No. 2 Pilots too much for USD to handle

Justin Saks / Staff Writer / The USD Vista

With their sights set on a West Coast Conference championship, the USD women’s soccer team was going for the Torero hat trick. Earlier on Saturday both the volleyball team and the men’s basketball team were victorious at the Jenny Craig Pavilion. The soccer team was hoping that a little bit of that success would make its way into Torero Stadium for their matchup with the Portland Pilots.

Looking for their eighth straight victory in front of a packed stadium, the Toreros went into halftime tied at zero with the Pilots.

“I feel the turn out was great and I think it helped us forget about the nerves and just play,” senior forward Jen Mello said, who leads the team with 11 goals.

The Toreros were keeping up with the No. 2 team in the nation and were 45 minutes away from being at least co-WCC champions. With no possibilty of overtime or a shootout, the Toreros were looking to take sole possession of first place.

Only 41 seconds into the second half, Elissa Magracia of the Toreros fielded a lob from teammate Amy Epsten and punched the ball into the back of the net. It was only the fifth goal of the season that Portland had given up, and it was one that goalie Kelly Davis had no chance of stopping after she had committed to charging the ball.

Just a short eight minutes later, the lead had disappeared. Sophie Schmidt of the Pilots was able to get one past USD’s goalie Brittany Cameron to tie the game. The Pilots quickly accelerated their game and took over control both on the field and the scoreboard. With an up-tempo offense and excellent ball control, the Pilots added three more goals to take a commanding lead. Megan Rapinoe picked up the second goal for the Pilots and just two minutes later Michelle Enyeart padded the lead to 3-1. At that point both the Toreros and their fans knew it was going to be too great a task to pull off even a tie.

“I thought that Portland finally broke through. We had held them in check until that point,” USD senior Hector Zepeda said. “It’s an accomplishment to score one goal on them, let alone a few.”

With just four minutes left in the game, the Pilots sealed the game and the conference title as Halley Kreminski found the back of the net. “We have to keep our heads up and forget about this loss and focus on the tournament,” Mello said.

Despite the loss, the 14-4-2 Toreros will for sure be one of the 64 teams heading to the NCAA tournament. They finished the regular season second in the WCC with a 6-1 record. The Toreros will continue practicing this week and hope to start up a new winning streak come Friday as they play Long Beach State in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

“This week we just need to practice hard, keep our heads up and know we have the talent. I think we can take away from Portland the fact that we know we can hang with that type of team. We just have to sustain that type of play for the whole 90 minutes,” Mello said. “The feeling that we all had at the end of the game, I know that we don’t ever want to feel like that again.”