TUKWILA — After a season of defensive dominance, it was a momentary lapse, mere moments of indecision near midfield, that felled the Peninsula College women’s soccer team in a 1-0 Northwest Athletic Conference championship game loss to the Everett Trojans at Starfire Sports Stadium.
The decisive score came in the 80th minute when Everett striker Alma Manao went back to midfield to gather the ball before turning on an upfield charge and launching a successful shot to the upper right corner of the goal from just right of the 18-yard box.
Sunday’s defeat spelled the end for the Pirates dream of joining Tacoma (1996-98) and Walla Walla (2009-2011) as the third team in NWAC history to win three consecutive women’s soccer conference championships.
“I told them that’s the toughest loss of my coaching career, and it’s natural that people will feel frustrated,” Peninsula coach Kanyon Anderson said.
“But I told them to be sure we don’t fall into that trap of blaming people or blaming things, a trap that people fall into when things go wrong, and we want to avoid that.
“It’s just that we came so close and didn’t get it. And I think we know we could have.
“We had a couple of good chances in the first half that we missed and we were flirting with that all season — leaving chances on the table.
“And we left two great chances on the table in the first half, and I mean we make those and we are probably champions right now.”
That’s the game of soccer though, in a nutshell, the chances are often few, the final margin typically razor-thin, and this match proved no different.
Neither team could do much in the early going, but Everett had the game’s first chance on goal when the Trojans intercepted a pass through the middle and eventual tournament MVP Lauren Allison sent a right-to-left dribbler across the mouth of the Peninsula goal in the 15th minute.
The insertion of substitute Tasha Inong in the 17th minute opened up the Pirates’ offensive attack, with Inong winning a ball minutes later along the left sideline and pushing the ball up toward the Everett goal before Peninsula midfielder Brittney Yoshimura missed wide on a low shot to the Trojans’ right post.
Yoshimura’s sister, Brooke, came up from her spot at defender on a corner kick in the 33rd minute to provide the Pirates’ best scoring chance of the first half.
After the corner was sent in to the Everett area, the ball leaked out to Brooke Yoshimura just left of the 18-yard box, and the sophomore sent in a curling, left-to-right shot toward the right post that was saved by leaping Everett goalie Rachel Leupold.
A second-half switch in formation by the Trojans helped lead to Peninsula’s undoing.
“They switched to a 4-4-2 in the second half and quite honestly we didn’t have the size to match up with them in midfield,” Anderson said.
“So we struggled to win 50/50 balls in the middle, so their two players in the middle were able to win enough balls against our three players in the middle.
“Now, we’ve played against a 4-4-2 a dozen times this year and not had trouble with it. It’s just that Everett did a better job of winning the ball in the middle of the field.”
The change in tactics was obvious after halftime. The Pirates were able to earn one corner kick and a free kick on offense, but just one shot in the second half.
“They are a good team, well-coached,” Anderson said of Everett, the only team to beat Peninsula this season. The Trojans also beat the Pirates 1-0 in September.
“It’s just their size was the difference. A lot of those headers, if we win them and get the first touch, then the ball goes 20 yards up to our strikers.
“But we weren’t ever able to just back them up in the second half because we couldn’t win things in the middle part of the field.
“It just kept coming back at us.”
The Trojans attack built quickly, but Peninsula goalkeeper Emily Flinn up to the challenge when a dangerous through ball led to a shot by Everett forward Rachel Detroit in the 52nd minute.
Moments later, Flinn stepped forward to corral a C.J. Shaver free kick.
Ten minutes after that, Shaver clanged a hard shot off the crossbar, followed by a rebound and clashes for the ball in the box before Pirates defender Kamryn Barney executed a risky slide tackle to clear the ball from harm.
After another bit of nifty Trojan’s passing, Manao nailed a shot from center to the upper left-post only to see Flinn spring to her right just in time to stop what seemed like a certain goal.
The game-winning goal came with 10 minutes left when Manao moved back to midfield to gather the ball, then roared down the right side unmarked and sent a blast to the upper right post.
“That was just a great strike, but we didn’t do a great job of picking her up,” Anderson said.
“She’s a striker, she came back into the midfield and got the ball and then she turned.
“I think our back line wanted our midfielders to pick her up, but we were already marked up, we didn’t have anyone free to pick her up.
“She came 20 yards back and got it and then turned and ran 20 yards back at us.”
It was an uncharacteristic lapse for the Pirates, who earned 19 shutouts in 23 games and allowed just four goals all season.
“I’m not using this as an excuse but Kai [Mahuka] being hurt was big; she tried her best but wasn’t 100 percent,” Anderson said.
“That central midfield was big. We were out Brenda Torres, Kennady [Whitehead to injuries] — that made it hard.”
Peninsula had one final chance in extra time when Lexi Krieger sent a through ball into the box to find an onrushing Alyssa Bertuleit.
Bertuleit hustled onto the ball and for a moment it seemed like overtime would be earned. But Everett defender Ashley Simons somehow caught up to knock the ball away.
Anderson was appreciative of his team’s season-long efforts and discussed what made this team special after the game.
“We will probably never have a goalkeeping core like we did,” Anderson said.
“We had a great back line. I think that will be the thing we will look at. Just the best defense we’ve ever had, we gave up four goals all season. I don’t think anybody’s ever done that, it may be an NWAC record, very well could be.
“It was a great group of kids. I never had any issues off the field.
“This season was fun, we laughed a lot; that group joked a lot and cared for each other.”
Peninsula wasn’t a perfect team, instead of having one clear-cut goal scorer, the team spread the goals around with multiple skilled offensive players combining to put up 80 goals this season.
“Every game was a little bit of a puzzle for us in terms of how we would get the ball in the back of the net,” Anderson said.
“And sometimes that hurt us, because we didn’t have as much of a routine.
“I think that made us hard to scout but I think that made us . . . when we were in doubt we didn’t have a player that could serve as the focal offensively. And even if that player doesn’t score all the time, it takes the pressure off the rest of the team and lifts them.”
After a difficult year-ending defeat, the season-long journey up to that point becomes the reward.
“Our sophomores have been to the finals before and won it, so we had an understanding of what we needed to do this year,” Anderson said.
“We talked about enjoying the ride, enjoying each day of it.
“And the other part is knowing we were looking for something big at the end of the year. And even if we won a game easily by a couple of goals we would still think, ‘Was that our best effort?’ And really, that was our focus.”
________
Sports reporter Michael Carman can be contacted at 360-452-2345, ext. 5250 or at mcarman@peninsualdailynews.com.
