For the second year in a row, the ASU soccer team ended its campaign with seven season-ending injuries.

The Sun Devils lost leadership, faced adversity and fought a completely separate battle off the field.

The loss of players, games and, in some cases, family members, was challenging and with such a young team could have been a disaster.

But overcoming the adversity of the season resulted in a playoff invitation, and for the Sun Devils, proved to be a step in the right direction.

“The first thing I said is I thought we did very well facing a lot of adversity,” coach Kevin Boyd said. “What I mean by that is this team overcame significant challenges. We, again, took an awful lot of season-ending injuries. We had seven players by the end of the year that were out for the year. The norm is somewhere around three or four. That’s dramatic.”

But the challenges on the team weren’t the only obstacles the Sun Devils faced.

“We had significant family issues that impacted our program,” he said. “Parents passing away, grandparents — things like that. Usually you’re faced with one of those every other year. We had four in one year. We had an awful lot of challenges facing us off the field.”

Still, the Sun Devils managed to make it into the 2009 NCAA Tournament for the first time in six years, finishing the season with a record of 9-8-3.

“For this team to perform the way they did being as young as they are, is a credit to their focus and their mentality,” Boyd said. “From that standpoint I thought they did very well. To get into the playoffs for the first time since 2003 is what we think of as a first step. It’s the step we have been wanting for two years. For us to get it this year with all of that going on is a credit to this team. They started us in the direction that we wanted to go.”

The addition of 13 freshmen to this year’s roster put youth as an internal obstacle, but its character made up for the experience that this team lacked, Boyd said.

“I thought as a whole we did very well facing another year of adversity,” he said. “There were some challenges we faced going from nonconference to conference play, obviously the biggest challenge was the loss of a senior leader. When we lost her that affected us dramatically.”

That leader was senior goalkeeper Briana Silvestri, whose season ended at the start of the Pac-10 regular season when she tore her anterior cruciate ligament, but in the midst of the top-25 competition their conference provided, the Sun Devils found a way to battle at the end of the season before falling in the first round of the tournament to Wisconsin on penalty kicks.

“The margin of difference for the majority of those games was a hair of difference,” Boyd said. “Losing a senior leader can account for a lot of that. It’s not about the playing, it’s about the leadership provided, the ability in that personality … their confidence and their voice.

“It took our freshman goalkeeper a few games to get weathered and to learn the speed of the game at this level. She ended up doing very well. We showed that in our last few games.”

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