UCLA Women’s Soccer Team are National Champions!

The UCLA women’s soccer team made history on Monday December 5th, 2022 by winning the National Championship! This is their first women’s soccer championship since 2013. It had been a long hard fought season for the lady Bruins and after they lost to UC Irvine in 2021 to knock them out of their season they were determined this year to make it all the way to the National Championship.

After beating the University of Virginia UCLA earned them a spot in the Women’s College Cup as semi-finalists and they headed to North Carolina to hopefully make it to the National Championship. The Bruins played a terrific game against Alabama beating them 3-0 sending them straight to the NATTY!  They quickly prepared for their game against the University of North Carolina (UNC) and knew they had to work very hard to beat them even though they had already beaten them earlier in the season. Then on Monday night UCLA and UNC were ready to play each other.

As soon as that whistle was blown both teams came in full force to play the game of their lives. The first half had a few great plays but at half-time that score was still 0-0. Then 14 minutes in the half Avery Patterson a forward for UNC scored off of a header giving UNC that 1-0 lead that both teams so desperately wanted. With 15 minutes left Avery Patterson scores again giving UNC that 2-0 lead. The UCLA bruins were not happy with the result but they knew they had 15 minutes left to play and that every second counts. With 10 minutes left it didn’t look like UCLA could pull it off but then Lexi Wright a sophomore forward scores making it a 2-1 game. In the final minute UNC was till up by one and UCLA had a corner to take and that was their last chance to keep this game alive. As soon as the ball was released Turner read it the whole way and had a beautiful header to make the game tied at 2-2 with 17 seconds to spare.

The game then went into overtime and with 3 and a half minutes left Maricarmen Reyes scored to make it a 3-2 lead for UCLA and then just like that UCLA became the National Champions for 2022. A team is not made up of just a few players, so it took a lot of effort and commitment from 35 amazing women to make it to this point. Behind every good team is a good coach and Head Coach Margueritte Aozasa brought nothing but the best for her team. She transferred to UCLA from being a assistant coach at Sandford the year before to becoming the head coach. She is the first, first year head coach to ever win a National Championship and just recently signed a contract to stay with the UCLA Bruins into 2028.

Since there return to UCLA the Women’s soccer team have had many interviews and some have even been on talk shows and they are taking in that National Championship life.