Right now they know they need to focus on the little things.
The Sun Devils have to find a way to get their groove back.
At the beginning of the Pac-10 season, the ASU soccer team was working to secure their identity.
The Sun Devils saw their 7-1-2 record as a gauge, and the competition they faced in the nonconference season gave them an idea as to how their team would measure up in the Pac-10 season.
But with the loss of senior goalkeeper Briana Silvestri to a season-ending anterior cruciate ligament injury during a September game against Pepperdine, the Sun Devils (7-5-3, 0-4-1, Pac-10) lost a part of the preseason identity they had worked so hard to obtain.
“One of the things we did very well is that we were disciplined in the first half of the season,” head coach Kevin Boyd said. “Disciplined means we weren’t making little errors, or if we did, we cleaned them up right away. We were able to stay focused on what we need to do.
“We lost a lot of leadership when we lost Briana Silvestri, and that has impacted us in a significant way.”
Silvestri’s four-year career as a Sun Devil goalkeeper includes several significant accomplishments.
She entered the 2009 season first on ASU’s all-time list in career goals against average, with a 0.83, fourth in career shutouts with 12 and fifth in career saves with 120.
Silvestri also set ASU’s single-season record for goals against average in each of the last two seasons.
Her performance, an undeniable complement to her personality, was one of the anchors to the Sun Devil soccer team.
“She is behind the team,” Boyd said. “Her ability to talk and hold them accountable and push them and do all of that — you need someone on your field to do that. When we lost her, we lost that element, so the team’s trying to create that because we don’t really have a personality like that left on the field. They’re trying to recreate that with an abundance of younger players.”
With last weekend’s 2-1 double overtime loss against UA, the Sun Devils prolonged their winless streak to five games.
“It’s always hard when you play your rival and you end up losing in double overtime,” junior midfielder Alexandra Elston said. “But we can’t let it get us down, we still have a chance — we can’t let it change our mentality. We can still get into [the] playoffs, so we just have to pick it up and keep playing.”
This weekend, the team travels to the Bay Area to take on both Stanford and California, two more of the Pac-10’s toughest competitors.
“We know we play Stanford, and they are No. 1 in the country right now,” Elston said. “We just have to know that. We’re the underdogs, and we have to put in all we have. If we lose, well OK, but if we win, it will be great.”
As the underdogs in this weekend’s competition, the Sun Devils will work to re-establish their identity and hold themselves to a higher standard of play.
“We’re trying to get the whole team to hold ourselves to a higher standard,” Boyd said. “We’re also trying to keep a clear identity and a perception of exactly who we are. We had a clear identity in the first half; we’ve lost it a little bit in this transition time without Briana, so we’re trying to get that back and know who we are and play to our strengths and be that team.”
Reach the reporter emiley.darling@asu.edu.
