The following story ran in the Spring 2023 Issue of Bruin Blue Magazine.

By Jon Gold

The phone call is supposed to happen around 4 p.m. on a mid-January Friday, but Madelyn Desiano is not picking up.

It's been a whirlwind 24 hours for the UCLA graduate defender. The previous day, she was announced as the final pick of the National Women's Soccer League Draft by the Houston Dash, and now she's dashing home from Philadelphia, where the draft was held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

She was supposed to have landed midday, but her flight has been delayed. It turns out, she's stuck in the clouds.

But forget her flight home — Desiano has been floating above 10,000 feet for more than weeks, ever since she played one of several pivotal roles in one of the greatest goals in collegiate soccer history.
She's not coming down any time soon, and neither are her teammates.
To truly understand how UCLA pulled off perhaps the best comeback in championship game history on Dec. 5, a 3-2 win over North Carolina after being behind 2-0 with under 10 minutes left, you must go back to last December.

On Dec. 29, 2021, former Stanford assistant coach Margueritte Aozasa was named the sixth head coach in Bruins soccer history. Aozasa vowed not to just usher in a new era of UCLA women's soccer, but a new age. A different approach, filled with empathy and fueled by patience, soccer not as a metaphor for war but one for peace.

"From day one, Marg established trust," Desiano said. "We had individual meetings, and this time last year was all about her getting to know us. From very early on, the team knew trust was big, and trust both ways."

By the beginning of the 2022 campaign, the Bruins were fully bought in to Aozasa's style, and an early season Tobacco Road sweep at Duke and North Carolina only went to further the Bruins' bravado. On Sept. 1, UCLA won 2-1 over the Blue Devils and, three days later, beat the top-ranked Tar Heels by the same score. Star junior forward Reilyn Turner had the game-winning goal in both big wins.

"Having new coaches this past year, we've had to adjust, and lucky for us, it was a seamless adjustment," Turner said. "They came into this program and enforced positivity, and we started off extremely strong. Our first trip to North Carolina in the preseason set us up for what we saw in the final."
 

Aozasa had seen college soccer at the highest levels. She knew what it meant to build a program to a championship level.

When hired by UCLA, she was only a dozen years removed from her own playing days as a four-year starter for legendary head coach Jerry Smith at Santa Clara, where she was a two-time team captain. She'd been an assistant with Stanford since 2015, serving as the right-hand woman for Paul Ratcliffe as they led the Cardinal to NCAA titles in 2017 and 2019 and five-straight league championships from 2015-19.

But though she studied under some greats, Aozasa was excited to introduce her own style in her first collegiate head-coaching gig.

"I've had a lot of coaches along the way, and I'm not sure any of them have my philosophy fully," she said. "In a weird way, it came to me this year, my first year as a head coach, my vision for what the program was, and it came to me by necessity. I asked my staff, 'What do we want the direction to be?'"

Ultimately, Aozasa challenged the very fundamental core of coaching.

"We're trying to teach them how to see the game like coaches, how to appreciate the game more strategically and more globally," she said, "and that's the most fun part: Teaching them the process of thinking, not teaching them the right answer."
The way Aozasa describes coaching soccer is beautiful.

"It is an IQ test, not a final exam," she says.

This isn't college football, where a head coach calls his play into the quarterback and the team executes based mainly on rote memory. This isn't college basketball, where a coach can call a timeout and draw up his favorite backdoor screen. This isn't college baseball or softball, when a coach can take a leisurely visit to the mound or pull a batter aside and tell them to look for low and away.

Or, let's put it this way: soccer is jazz, baby.

"Soccer is so fluid; one of the hardest things as a coach is understanding you can't go step-by-step, you can't go black-and-white, 'When this happens, you do this,'" Aozasa said. "There are countless factors, even just based on one's own ability — what's the correct decision for you might be a totally different decision for someone else. It's a weird game to teach. There are so many solutions.

"We have a saying, you either make the right decision or make the decision right."

With about 22 seconds left in the NCAA tournament final, down a goal and facing the depths of despair, her Bruins did both.

A series of key decisions — and even more impressive execution — helped UCLA tie the game on one of the all-time plays in school history, regardless of sport: Ally Lemos' pitch-perfect corner kick that found the forehead of an airborne Turner, hurling herself toward the goalie box with reckless abandon, the ball bouncing into the back of the net with just seconds left to play.

It was one of the purest, rawest displays of clutch play and sheer determination Bruin fans will ever witness, made possible by three phenomenal individual efforts.

It was Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans all rolled into one.

Pure jazz.
First, the setup.

Entering the playoffs after a crushing 2-0 loss to the rival Trojans, UCLA spent most of its practice time focused on two key areas: Set pieces and end-of-match tactics.

Little did they know how crucial that extra practice time would be. No, scratch that — they knew exactly how crucial it would be. Aozasa showed the Bruins clips of LAFC winning the MLS Cup the weekend before the playoffs began. The final score was 3-3, and five-of-six goals came from set pieces. UCLA coaches especially knew that North Carolina was susceptible from set pieces entering the tournament, as 70 percent of the Tar Heels' goals against had come from designed plays.

But with about 22 seconds left in regulation of the championship game, that wasn't exactly on Desiano's mind.

Or, at least, it wasn't conscious.
 

She just knew that she wanted to set her Bruins up with the best chance of tying the game, and where she was — on the right side of the field, with her body positioned awkwardly and the team without numbers in the box — didn't give them that chance. Instead of trying to cross the ball into scoring territory, she banged the ball off a North Carolina defender and out of bounds, creating a corner kick opportunity.

With the clock running and time running out, both she and Lemos, the talented and steady freshman who'd been one of UCLA's primary corner kick specialists all year, sprinted to the sideline.

Getting an assist from a young ball girl on the sidelines who tossed her the ball, Desiano had a decision: shoo Lemos away and attempt the kick herself or put the ball into the hands — or is it feet? — of a true freshman.

"I just thought, 'I'm not in a mental state to hit this corner kick, and I was so glad Ally was running up," Desiano said. "I didn't even look at her. I didn't say anything. I just tossed her the ball. I didn't even stay over there for us to go short. I just remember thinking, here I am as a 5th-year leader, giving the fate of my career to an 18-year-old freshman.

"That was like me giving her the ball and my career at once."
Hitting a good ball out of a set piece is one of the most nuanced skills in soccer.

What you're looking for is the "weight" and "texture" of the pass, because, Aozasa points out, soccer exists on multiple planes. "It is almost infinite," she says. "There are ground passes and lofted passes that hang in the air, and everything in between. And then there's the kind of kick: hit the ball with your laces, and that's going to be much flatter, much harder to settle, or hit it with backspin or inside spin or outside spin. There's a dozen factors — maybe a hundred, maybe a million — that determine the success or failure of a kick.

Those who are good at these entry passes are extremely valuable, but because corner kicks are relatively rare, it is considered a complementary skill, not a primary one.

"I wouldn't recruit a player who is average and can hit a good ball," Aozasa said.

They wouldn't get enough opportunities, after all. But in Lemos' case, in addition to being one of the best young players in college soccer, she happens to be one of the best passers in the world, says Aozasa. Not only are the great passers able to recognize the depth and the scene, but the timing and the coverage. And then there's the technique and texture and weight.

Lemos has played soccer since she was a young girl, and she's worked on set pieces almost every day after training. Her skill doesn't come from nowhere.

"I'm not leaving the field until I play the perfect ball in," she said.

But that's practice.

This was 20 seconds left in the national championship game in front of a vastly pro-North Carolina crowd.

Lemos, who just a few months before was finishing up her senior year at San Dimas High, was somehow at peace.

"We all knew, this is our last shot," she said. "I just kicked it and it was probably the best ball I've ever played ... It was almost like an out-of-body experience. Like, what the heck is happening? Even when it happened, I was like no way. Everyone dreams of that moment. That was out of a movie."

But what is a good movie without a thrilling final act?  

As Lemos is setting up to kick, her UCLA teammates are jostling for position, but surprisingly not getting what they expect out of the North Carolina defense, which stacked its goal line with players but failed to defend the back post.
Turner, one of the best goal-scorers in college soccer, saw what unfolded in slow motion. She realized she wasn't being checked. She noticed keenly that she had a relatively unimpeded path toward the goal line, if the pass was just right.
It was.

One second after Lemos uncorks it with 20 seconds left, Turner starts her dash.

Where she'll end up — and how she'll land — is not a concern. As the ball starts to fall after reaching its apex, Turner pushes forward, and just as the ball gets near, she hurls herself forward and into the net, but not before banging it in with her forehead.

"I didn't care where I ended up," Turner said. "I didn't care if I landed and broke my leg. We all felt like it was do-or-die. Lucky enough I was back post, and I was able to — I don't know what I did. Head it? Shoulder? Who knows?"
When the ball left Lemos' foot, Aozasa was far away, across the field, with crossed fingers and bated breath.

From her vantage point, the ball had a decent chance of going in even without Turner's efforts, but she left no doubt. Almost 40 yards away, Aozasa simply saw Turner kamikaze herself toward the back of the goal.

"She took herself, the ball and three UNC players with her," Aozasa said. "I couldn't see what had exactly happened because of the commotion. All I could see was the ball hit the net and the net went up and it was in."

And then the pandemonium set in. UCLA players sprinted down the field in shock while Tar Heels players stood there, mouths agape. The Bruins were given a second wind. There was no way they were going to lose now, after coming back from a two-goal deficit with 10 minutes to play.

And they didn't.

With three minutes, 20 seconds left in double-overtime, Maricarmen Reyes squeezed in a rebound shot past Allen to put UCLA ahead, and the Bruins became the first team to win an NCAA Division I women's soccer title with a first-year coach.
Was it fate? No, it wasn't fate, even if there were a few strange coincidences.

"Maddi always says it was already written," Turner said, "and before the final, my mom told me, you haven't scored on a header in a long time, keep your eyes open. And you need to score on a corner. And she even told me to start out further in set pieces, and I don't think she realizes I actually listened to her.

"She played college soccer at UNLV. She knows a thing or two."

If it wasn't fate, what was it? It was tremendous execution borne from tremendous preparation.

"In our pregame and everything, we talked a lot about high-pressure situations, and we say, 'Serve the keeper,' put the ball in the most dangerous position possible," Aozasa said. "The most dangerous spot, with the most dangerous players, and now UNC has to make a play on the ball."

It was a freshman delivering on the biggest stage of her life.

"There's not many people who can do that, let alone with that stress," Turner said. "The stars aligned for us. It was honestly a miracle."

It was trust from the top of the team on down.

"If you take a step back and look at it holistically, that play was a product of our willingness to get the job done as a team," Desiano said. "It was buy-in from the whole team. The starters, the bench, every person to make it happen."
It was a bit of faith mixed with a bit of focus, prayer meeting preparation.

"There are so many little details that go into every pass, and those details are what makes it great," Lemos said. "If I had hit that ball any differently, who knows what happens? I still have faith we would've scored. I just prayed I didn't kick it out of bounds."

It was all of that and more.

And more than anything, it was pure jazz.