Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

College soccer: ENMU women fall short in title game

CANYON, Texas — One had Scott. One did not.

Plenty more could be said about Sunday’s Lone Star Conference women’s soccer championship, but Trenaday Scott’s two goals spoke loudest in a 2-0 Angelo State win that sent the Rambelles to their first Division II tournament and ended Eastern New Mexico’s best season in program history with a disappointing thud.

The Rambelles (12-6-2) received the LSC’s automatic bid into the Division II tournament, return to Canyon Friday to face Colorado-Colorado Springs. Top-seed and No. 19 West Texas A&M, eliminated from the tournament Friday by ENMU, goes in as an at-large bid and faces the ASU-CSUCS winner Sunday.

The Greyhounds (9-9-2) and Rambelles both entered Sunday seeking their first LSC tournament win in program history. It was the second time in two Sundays the teams matched up, with Angelo’s 1-0 win on Oct. 28 at Greyhound Stadium clinching the second seed and a first-round bye.

“The only way we were getting into the regional is by winning the (conference) tournament,” said Angelo State coach Travis McCorkle. “I figured that after the portion of our non-conference schedule. We didn’t do well enough. I knew the only way we’d get in was through the tournament, and we talked about that early on and set that as our objective. Trying to get a bye was the first objective, and then winning the tournament.”

Scott, already the LSC’s leading scorer entering the tournament, was named tournament MVP after netting her 16th and 17th goals on Sunday.

The game was even through most of the first half, with neither team seriously threatening until Scott deposited Chloe Souza’s one-touch pass past Eastern’s Taylor Jackson with 92 seconds left before halftime.

A goal that late in a first half is big on any level, but every goal was big in an LSC tournament which had just seven total goals scored in five games and every winner advancing via shutout.

“I don’t even think it was the timing; it was more how we let the goal in,” ENMU coach Joshua Smith said. “It was a ball that should have been saved by our goalkeeper, and it was a ball where we should have had the girl marked up. You make two mental mistakes in marking and saving, the ball ends up in the back of the net. At this level, you can’t do that and get away with it.”

Scott added the insurance goal with just over 24 minutes to play, taking advantage of a backline mistake to put the Angelo State fans in early celebration mode.

“She’s a great finisher,” McCorkle said of Scott. “She doesn’t need a lot of chances. She gets in front of a goal and knows she wants to score. This year, she’s improved her accuracy a little bit and done really well to get other players involved. When she gets more players involved, the more teams can’t figure out how to defend us.”

Angelo State, meanwhile, figured out how to make the fifth-seeded Greyhounds punchless. Eastern had eight total shots, and the five shots that reached the goal were long kicks that posed no particular challenge to freshman keeper Kira Miller.

“We changed our system,” McCorkle said of the defensive approach against ENMU. “(Midfielder Samantha) Fabela, for them, is so good on distributing the ball. We really made sure to try to neutralize her and not have her be as big of an impact as she was previously.”

While Angelo State moves on, the Greyhounds will now reflect on their most successful season ever and retool to make 2019 even better.

“First time we’ve been at nine wins since 2014,” Smith said. “We’ve taken more shots this year than any program in the history of ENMU. We’ve allowed fewer shots than any program in the history of ENMU. There’s a lot to build on for us. The girls played with a lot of heart. We lose one starter, two off our bench. We’ve got a lot coming back.”

The shopping list may be short, but the wish list is pretty obvious. No Greyhound scored more than five goals, while each of the LSC’s top three seeds had a player with double-digit goals.

“We need somebody who puts the ball in the back of the net,” Smith said. “Our leading goal scorer shouldn’t be a centerback that we throw up top in the last couple games of the season. We need somebody who’s going to be a consistent threat up top, who has the desire to score and has the desire to take people one-on-one. That’s what we’ve been missing all year. Even in our losses, we outplayed most of the teams.”

Keyara Zuniga, who scored twice in ENMU’s first-round win over Texas A&M-Commerce, made the all-tournament team, and was joined by sister Hayden Zuniga and Julia Tucker, who scored the overtime goal over WT that put ENMU into the title match.