In Friday night’s game against Stanford, winning wasn’t necessarily all that mattered.

The ASU women’s soccer team, which has gone winless in its Pac-10 season, matched up against the top-ranked Cardinal.

And in a 3-1 loss, it recovered a part of the team it was in the nonconference season.

“You have to play with everything that you have when you play someone like that,” coach Kevin Boyd said. “Truth is, they’re better than we are —they’re quite a bit better than we are. They are better than pretty much everybody in the country. So we just had to go out there and battle with everything we had from the first second until the last whistle blew. That takes a tremendous amount of energy, and that’s what we did.”

Though the Cardinal outshot the Sun Devils 33-10, and had a 10-0 advantage in corner kicks, ASU freshman goalkeeper Alyssa Gillmore made 12 saves.

Junior midfielder Jill Shoquist led the Sun Devils with three shots, while redshirt freshman forward Courtney Tinnin and junior midfielder Alexandra Elston both contributed two.

It was Tinnin, whose goal from 30 yards out to cut Stanford’s lead to 2-1, who allowed the Sun Devils to remain competitive.

“We hung in there with them, and the score was respectable,” Boyd said.
“We thought we played pretty well, and we were quite happy with the intensity and the effort that we put in.”

But the effort they displayed on Friday night didn’t remain steady throughout the weekend.

Sunday’s 3-2 overtime loss to California showed a variety of effort levels by the Sun Devils (7-7-3, 0-6-1) in a game they eventually gave away.

“The first half we didn’t play well,” Boyd said. “We were very, very flat. The second half, we responded and started playing well. We got a great goal out of Alexandra and tied the game up and really were doing a great job.”

Elston and Tinnin scored the goals in Sunday’s game and have become the team’s leading scorers with five goals apiece.

“They’re technical, they read the game well and they put a tremendous amount of effort out there every single time,” Boyd said. “Because of that, good things happen to them — they find goals and they find assists. I am really pleased with both of them.”

But the Sun Devils’ exhaustion dwarfed their effort, and with 10 minutes left in the game, Boyd said it became clear that their legs had given up.

“Our legs were done,” Boyd said. “When we got into overtime, we were just exhausted and we started making errors. We weren’t attacking. We were letting them come at us. You can’t do that with a good team, because ultimately they will find a goal, and that’s what they did.”

Cal junior Lisa Kevorkian scored the game-winning goal in overtime for the Golden Bears (10-7-1, 4-4-0).

ASU will close out the regular season next weekend in Tempe against Oregon State and Oregon.

Reach the reporter at emiley.darling@asu.edu.