‘Eaters open with a bang
Last year, the UC Irvine women’s soccer team stockpiled clean sheets. In its season opener on Friday, it apparently decided to pile on.
The Anteaters, who scored 14 goals in 19 games in 2015 while enduring its second straight losing season (7-11-1), scored a pair of goals in each half to secure a 4-2 season-opening nonconference win over visiting Fairfield.
And it may only be the start of an offensive trend.
“We have a goal of scoring 50 goals this season, so we’re on track for that,” said sophomore forward Lili Andino, who came off the bench to produce both of UCI’s first-half goals. Andino’s two goals are one more than she had her entire freshman campaign.
“We were talking about it one day in the locker room and we decided [50] was our number,” Andino said. “This is what we’re going to shoot for.”
Junior forward Kiana Palacios, who led the team with five goals in 2015 to earn second-team All-Big West Conference honors, added two second-half scores to expand the hosts’ lead to three goals.
Fairfield, coming off a 5-10-4 season in which it was blanked just twice, received two goals from senior forward Brenna Brown to keep things from getting out of hand.
“It’s huge,” UCI Coach Scott Juniper said of his team’s 17-9 advantage in shots, with four each by Palacios, Andino, junior midfielder Alex Karlowitsch and junior forward Grayson Galbraith. “We had it in us last season [when UCI was blanked 10 times], but the stars just did not align for us. We have to keep moving forward and with the players we have, who we can put in a number of different positions … They still are not firing like they should, so we’re still not there. I think if we find ourselves in the same situations two or three weeks from now, it could be five or six goals.”
Andino, inserted into the game just minutes before, opened the scoring by finishing a nifty set piece in the 38th minute. Karlowitsch began the play by softly bumping a pass to her left that junior forward Noel Baham ran onto and crossed in front of the goal. Andino charging toward the net, caromed the ball in.
A second Baham-to-Andino connection in the 39th minute doubled the UCI lead, though the Stags answered just 29 seconds later to half the deficit.
Palacios, who returned Sunday from training with the Mexican team that will compete in the U20 World Cup later this fall, tucked a penalty kick inside the left post in the 66th minute. The penalty shot was created when freshman reserve Jessica Miclat was tripped in the 18-yard box.
In a sign that those stars may be align more productively for UCI this season, Palacios bended in a drive from the right wing that she did not intend to find the net to make it 4-1 in the 72nd minute.
“It was supposed to be a cross, but it somehow went in the goal,” Palacios said. “Those kinds of goals are the best.”
Though UCI scored at least two goals in only three games last season, with a high of three, Juniper and Palacios said the best may be yet to come.
“When I first heard [the projected goal of 50], I thought that was a lot,” Palacios said. “But at the same time, we have players who can make that happen. We have players who know how to score and are really consistent. I just think we can do it. We can probably go even more than 50 goals, I think.”
To put 50 goals in perspective, UCI has averaged 29.1 goals in Juniper’s previous nine seasons, with a high of 49 by the 2010 team that went 19-3-2, won the Big West Conference and reached the Sweet 16 in the NCAA Tournament.
The ‘Eaters scored just 40 goals the last two seasons combined.
Freshman goalkeeper Maddie Newsome made four saves, while senior Kelsey Texeira distinguished herself on the back line for the winners, who last won an opener in 2011.
