LA JOLLA – Don’t quit your day job. That’s the go-to line when someone you know is singing and they think it sounds better than everyone around them. The guess here is that I wasn’t the only one thinking it as the members of the Chico State women’s soccer team surprisingly broke into Adele’s “Someone Like You” after playing Cal State Stanislaus to a 1-1 draw through 90 minutes of regulation and two 10-minute overtime periods. Penalty kicks were looming, but they were singing.
Their day job – playing solid women’s soccer – continues. The Wildcats made sure of that by advancing to the second round of the NCAA Championship Tournament on penalty kicks Friday night in La Jolla on the campus of UC San Diego.
For the Chico State women’s soccer team, it isn’t over.
The Wildcats made four of five tries and Cal State Stanislaus missed twice. Fittingly, it was Carly Singer who set the tone for Chico State, hitting a laser into the left corner that gave the Wildcats control for keeps. Danielle Leiva and Blake Lopes also converted for Chico State, setting the stage for fifth-year senior Molly Downtain to finish it.
She did so with a flourish, firing a shot into the upper-V and setting off a wild celebration filled with screams, hugs and tears.
Her secret? “I was signing Adele in my head,” she said.
Credit Chico State men’s soccer player Tyson Crim with the assist. Or blame him for it if you’re the team’s bus driver, who now has to listen the Wildcats sing for at least two more days.
“We were riding home from the airport with the guys and Tyson Crim was singing it and it just kind of caught on,” said Downtain. “It’s turned in to the theme for our season.”
The Wildcats, now 11-5-4, will attempt to keep on rocking when they face UC San Diego Sunday at noon for a spot in the NCAA Championship Tournament West Region title tilt for the second time in three years.
They hope the déjà vu stops here. The only other time in the program’s history that the Wildcats have advanced in the NCAA Tournament was back in 2009. Like Friday, Downtain secured a 4-3 win in penalty kicks. She was the last shooter, shooting into the same goal one the same side of the field two years ago.
But the Wildcats went on to lose 2-1 to the Tritons after taking an early 1-0 lead. Like they were that day, they’ll again be underdogs as the No. 5 seed playing the top team in the West.
But they’ve played well in the underdog role this season. The Wildcats played then-unbeaten UC San Diego to a scoreless draw on Oct. 2. They upset Cal State L.A. in the opening round of last weekend’s California Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA) Championship Tournament. And by getting past Cal State Stanislaus on Friday, they eliminated a team that had beaten them twice already this season, including a 4-0 drubbing last Sunday for the CCAA Championship Tournament title.
It looked as though the Wildcats’ season-long struggle against Cal State Stanislaus would continue Friday when Karenee Demery drove home the first goal of the match just 8:16 in.
But unlike last Sunday, the Wildcats responded in style.
Head Coach Kim Sutton deserves at least some of the credit for that. During Thursday’s practice she stopped play in the middle of a drill that was not going particularly well. She brought the team together to talk about what was going wrong, how the women were responding, and how they could choose to respond differently to adversity.
The message was apparently heard. The Wildcats shored things up on the defensive end, led by Leiva, who bottled up the exceedingly dangerous Demery. And with 3:03 to play in the half, the Wildcats got the equalizer they desperately needed.
Downtain went on attack on the Wildcats’ first corner and drove home Lopes’ driving ball with a header from the penalty kick spot.
Lopes set the play in motion by forcing the corner with an aggressive attack down the middle of the pitch. She powered through a pair of defenders and slipped a through ball toward Alyx Williams. It was deflected by a defender and ran over the end line.
Furner made five saves, including one on a breakaway in the 23rd minute that could have marked the beginning of the end for the Wildcats. But none was bigger than her denial of Allison Case’s try to start penalty kicks.
The true freshman punched away Allison Case’s low liner with a dive to her left that gave the Wildcats control of the PKs.
“Whenever a goalkeeper makes a save on the first one it’s incredibly big,” said Sutton, who never mentioned the fact that Furner is just a freshman. “You kind of forget she’s a freshman,” she said when reminded of that fact. “She’s certainly not playing like one any more.”
But Sutton saved her highest praise for the four players she called her “heroic seniors.”
“Blake (Lopes), Kasey (Wall), Molly (Downtain) and Lisa (Webster) just got it done tonight,” said Sutton. “Blake and Molly played the games of their lives.”
That pair wrote the date of the CCAA Championship Tournament opener, 11/4/11, on their wrist tape for every regular-season match. Once they reached the conference championship tournament, they began writing 11/11/11, in reference to the opening night of the NCAA Championship Tournament. But there was no date on their wrists Friday. Instead, they simply wrote: “Enjoy it.”
Then they went out to did just that.
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