As Nandi Pryce stepped up to the ball, she knew her team needed
a make to stay in the game.
So she made her approach and noticed the goalie leaning slightly
to her left. Pryce altered her initial plan, the plan she has
followed her entire life, and sent the ball toward the right of the
goal.
The kick sailed wide, effectively ending the Bruins’
season. Just like that.
And such is the brutal nature of penalty kicks ““ one
slight miscue, one crushing blow, one season over.
It is a feeling the UCLA women’s soccer team knows all too
well.
After utterly dominating Texas A&M last year in the third
round of the NCAA Tournament, outshooting the Aggies 21-0, the
Bruins lost the game in a penalty kick shootout, 3-1.
“It was awful,” Pryce said.
But probably the worst part of the entire situation is that the
Bruins weren’t ready. The team had hardly worked on penalty
kicks in practice, and they hadn’t taken the prospect of
going to penalty kicks very seriously.
“The best team in the country wasn’t supposed to go
into PKs,” Pryce said. “That wasn’t part of what
we did.”
Well, it is now.
In an effort to avoid last season’s debacle, the Bruins
have been practicing penalty kicks for the last six weeks, having
every player taking kicks at the end of practice.
“This year, we have prepared 100 times more than we had
last year,” coach Jill Ellis said. “Last year, we just
got out a couple of days before and asked, “˜Who wants to take
them? This year, we went through every kick they’ve taken
throughout the six weeks.”
“We took the number that they’ve taken and the
number that they made, and we’ve looked at percentages. It
was pretty high-tech for us,” she added.
Looking at the percentages has provided Ellis with a firm grasp
of various players’ kick-taking ability.
She has selected her top 11 players, five of whom would
potentially take the kicks if a game comes to that situation.
Additionally, one need not be in at the end of the game, or even
play in the game at all, to participate in the shootout.
Midfielders Whitney Jones, Lindsay Greco, Sarah-Gayle Swanson,
and Stephanie Kron, along with forwards Iris Mora and Bristyn
Davis, and defenders Kendal Billingsley, Michelle Gleason, Kathryn
Lee, Mary Castelanelli and Pryce comprise the 11.
Ellis hasn’t decided on the final five kickers, instead
preferring to determine the five and their order during the game,
based on each player’s performance and confidence level.
But no matter which Bruins are called upon to take the kicks,
the group as a whole feels more confident in themselves than they
did against the Aggies.
“I think we’re really prepared,” Pryce said.
“We’ve taken them so much this year that
everyone’s really comfortable with it.”
“Every player out here is more confident because we have
repetition doing it,” Greco said. “I just hope we
don’t have to get to it.”
No one does, because penalty kicks as a system are such a tough
way to decide a hard-fought game. Determining the fate of a season
on a series of five kicks from 12 yards out just doesn’t seem
fair to most players.
“PKs are really like a coin flip,” Swanson said.
“It doesn’t decide who the better team is. It’s
ridiculous.”
The Bruin coach echoed her senior forward’s
sentiments.
“It stinks,” Ellis said. “It’s so hard
to score in our sport, and then for it to come down to what
essentially is a bit of a crapshoot. You don’t have much
control over it, and that’s why most coaches are disappointed
that it has to end like that.”
But that’s the system, and like it or not, the Bruins are
forced to deal with it.
Besides all the extra work in practice, Ellis has had Bruce
Hansen, the team’s performance enhancement specialist,
working with her players on the mental aspect of penalty kicks.
“Emotionally, I just work on making sure that
they’re relaxed and stress-free when they actually take the
kicks so that their body can just naturally do what they
practiced,” Hansen said.
“Jill wanted this to be something the girls felt confident
in and could do. When it came time, if it came to that, it was
something they knew they would be better at than the other
team,” he added.
A helpful idea Hansen introduced was actually simulating how
penalty kicks will go in a game, in practice.
The team sits at midfield, and one player at a time gets up,
jogs to the spot, and takes her kick on an actual goal with an
actual goalie.
“We’ve tried to simulate that rather than
joking,” Ellis said.
That’s because penalty kicks are no laughing matter, as
Texas A&M so aptly proved.
“Honestly, I have never been involved in a game where we
have dominated so much and not gotten the result,” Ellis
said.
The Bruins don’t want to have that feeling again, and as
the team gears up for its third-round match-up with Kansas on
Friday, the penalty kick preparation continues in practice.
And, being that it is the third round, it’s hard not to
think of last year.
“I think after the pain, it turned into
determination,” Ellis said. “And then you just kind of
become locked on.
“If we were to lose in penalty kicks this year, I could at
least say that we did everything we possibly could,” she
said.