ASU Women’s Lacrosse: Sun Devils wrap inaugural regular season with home loss to USC

(Photo: Nicholas Badders/WCSN)

Arizona State’s women’s lacrosse team took a bow on their home field for the final time this spring on Saturday afternoon, standing in front of the grandstand at the ASU Soccer/Lacrosse Stadium for one last serenading from the home crowd.

It didn’t matter much that the Sun Devil had just lost to No. 21 USC, 19-2. Or that their regular season will end with five straight defeats. They were due for the obligatory curtain call in the last home game of their inaugural season.

“We’ve grown tremendously,” junior co-captain Rachel Gregory said when asked how her young teammates have grown this year. “They’ve seen the experience they need to see and now they know this is real and this is tough and you can’t back down. They got a good taste of Division I.”

The Trojans’ dominance on Saturday morning was little surprise. Like most Pac-12 fos, USC overwhelmed the Sun Devils in all three phases. Though ASU was down just 5-1 early, the Trojans pulled away by outshooting ASU 41-10, retrieving 22 of the game’s 29 ground balls and winning the draw control battle 18-5. Even before halftime, USC took a 10-goal lead to institute the running clock rule.

“Was really impressed with our girls’ play in the first 20 minutes of the game,” coach Courtney Martinez Connor said. “I thought we just needed to get possession of the ball a little bit more and take more quality shots. Then the experience of USC kind of took over.”

Aside from a pair of close contests against Cal earlier this season — ASU split the season-series with the Golden Bears, its overtime win in Berkeley proving to be the Sun Devils lone conference victory — the first-year Sun Devils never found their footing in the league this season.

In truth, they were never really expected to, accurately picked in the preseason poll to finish last in the Pac-12’s debut season of women’s lacrosse.

It all did little to dampen the atmosphere of Saturday’s regular-season finale.

“We got crushed; the scoreboard showed (it). But there’s games where you get crushed and you feel so defeated. This one didn’t really feel like that,” junior co-captain Kerri Clayton said. “We definitely had good moments. Defense played great. We saw looks on offense.”

When Clayton scored 10 minutes into the afternoon, her team-high 41st goal of the season, it put the Sun Devils sideline into a frenzy. Sophomore attacker Carley Adams raced up and down the bench, distributing high-fives with party-like enthusiasm.

USC, a ranked team still vying for an NCAA tournament berth, were far more reserved while scoring the game’s next 15 goals. The Trojans’, after all, are hoping for bigger things ahead.

By its regular-season finale, ASU had already achieved its biggest accomplishments this season:

-The program’s first game and win (a 14-6 defeat of Kennesaw State on Feb. 9)

-The program’s first conference win (a 12-11 overtime thriller at Cal last month)

-The first full season of NCAA lacrosse, men’s or women’s, ever to be played by an Arizona school.

“After we had our first Pac-12 win, of course I wanted another one. But in all reality, we weren’t expecting that at the end of the day,” Martinez Connor said. “Not anything that I would have ever told our players but to have a conference win in your first year… there’s teams in lesser conferences than ours — not the No. 2 (conference in the country) — that haven’t had a conference win.”

ASU will go to Boulder, Colorado for the Pac-12 tournament next week (the Sun Devils will open the event with a rematch against USC in the single-elimination quarter-finals) before Martinez Connor turns her attention to the offseason. She already has some ideas on what year No. 2 of the program will look like.

“We have a great group coming back. We have a great group coming in and a mix of one year of experience with another great incoming freshmen class will add to even more improvements for next year,” she said.

But on Saturday, ASU closed the book on a milestone regular season. Martinez Connor couldn’t have asked for much more from her first group of Sun Devils.

“You want the world but expect nothing,” she said, reflecting on how the regular season matched her preseason expectations. “That mantra of, ‘You have to keep aspiring as high as you can’ is what we’ll keep telling the girls while secretly giving them the little fist-bumps.”