When the NSCAA/adidas poll’s No. 1 ranked UCLA women’s soccer team faces off against Portland tonight in the quarterfinals of the NCAA Tournament, it won’t be the first time the teams have met this season.
But at the same time, in a sense, it will be.
“It’ll be completely different this time,” UCLA coach Jill Ellis said. “Both teams have evolved.”
It has been quite some time since the two teams faced off last at Drake Stadium, when the Bruins captured a 2-1 overtime victory over a then higher-ranked Pilot squad. And in that time, much has changed.
UCLA’s confidence soared thanks to their ability to find a successful rhythm after recording the impressive win.
“Up until the Portland game, we hadn’t been playing particularly well; we didn’t really have a rhythm,” Ellis said. “After the Portland game, subsequently we started to play better and I think the win sort of gave us confidence.”
Meanwhile, Portland has used the loss as a motivating tool, and since their All-American senior defender, Stephanie Lopez, returned from playing with the U.S. women’s national team at the 2007 Women’s World Cup in China, the Pilots have been dominating.
The Pilots, like the Bruins, haven’t lost a game since the first meeting between the two teams during the regular season, and have outscored their opponents by an astounding 33-1 mark.
When UCLA and Portland first squared off, it marked the return of UCLA’s redshirt sophomore forward Kara Lang, who, like Lopez, had been competing in the Women’s World Cup, but with the Canadian National team.
It didn’t take Lang long to transition back into the college game that night, and despite having sat out the 2006 season while nursing a torn ACL, she scored in the seventh minute of the game after receiving a pass in the box from Pac-10 Player of the Year Lauren Cheney. Lang then finished them off with another goal in overtime after senior midfielder Danesha Adams found her for a long shot.
“That game was exciting overall for me, regardless of scoring goals or not scoring goals,” Lang said. “I was just so happy to be back.”
Tonight, however, the stakes are much higher, as the winner will earn one of four spots in the NCAA Women’s College Cup, hosted by Texas A&M in College Station, Texas.
For the Bruins, a win would mean a fifth consecutive appearance at the College Cup, which would break the record of four consecutive appearances they set last year. And there’s just one team they feel they need to focus on in order to achieve the feat.
“It’s about how we play the game, not how Portland plays,” Cheney said. “They’re just a formality. It’s just another team, we have to go out there with the same mentality that we always do.”
And at this point, the mentality the UCLA team has is one of sheer confidence and their attention is set on playing as well as they have been ever since their first win over the Pilots.
“There’s a confidence ““ not an arrogance, that when we put our minds to it, we can play well and play good soccer,” Ellis said. “I think that’s really what we’ve been trying to focus on: playing well. It’s not playing to see a result, it’s playing to play well and then earning a result.”
FREE KICKS: The Bruins and Pilots have made quite a West Coast rivalry of their meetings over the past several years, as tonight’s quarterfinal is a re-match of the 2006 quarterfinal, which was won by UCLA by a score of 2-1…UCLA has a 5-1 edge over Portland, but its one loss came at the worst time in the 2005 NCAA Championship game, a 4-0 defeat…Adams, Cheney, and junior midfielder Christina DiMartino were three of 15 players named M.A.C. Hermann Trophy Semifinalists. The four finalists will be announced on Dec. 14, and the winner will be selected on Jan. 11 at the Missouri Athletic Club.