Box Score SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — The game plan that Dominican University of California Director of Soccer Jon Delano devised for his women's soccer team to play touted Azusa Pacific University on Saturday worked very well but the Lady Penguins came up short.

The Lady Penguins (0-1-0/0-3-0) limited the high-scoring Azusa Pacific offense yet still suffered a 2-0 defeat in their Pacific West Conference opener at Kennelly Field in the John F. Allen Athletics Complex. The visiting Cougars (2-0-0/3-3-0) return three NAIA All-Americans and 11 seniors, including Shannon Righetti, niece of San Francisco Giants' pitching coach Dave Righetti, from a 16-3-2 team that played to the NAIA national playoff semifinals last season.

But, until Righetti's goal with 15:48 left in the game on Saturday, the Lady Penguins were pressing for a draw.
“Phil [Associate Head Coach Billeci-Gard] and I talked before the game that we really wanted to try to keep the game between the 18s [boxes] and I thought we did a really good job of that,” said Delano. “That's a lot of attacking talent that Azusa Pacific has, so I thought we executed our game plan well. We realized that if we were going to try to keep in between the 18s we weren't going to get too many offensive opportunities. But that strategy gave us the best opportunity to be in the game.”

And the Lady Penguins, playing their first game in 12 days, were. True, they struggled to create a scoring chance, in great part because they rarely kept possession of the ball in the offensive half of their zone in the first half.

Yet, the Penguins' four defenders of Megan Hanson, Kendra Corsberg, Kathryn Ripple, and Emily Whitaker were doing their best to keep the Cougars' forwards at a great distance from goalkeeper Megan Herring, who was making her first start of the season after missing the first two games because of injury.

Dominican succeeded in forcing the ball out of the box, limiting Azusa Pacific to only two shots in the first 32 minutes. Hanson, in fact, made a diving tackle to knock the ball away from the Cougars' Natalie Sun in what had been Azusa Pacific's best scoring chance.

However, Sun finally shook free of Dominican's defense to tally the game's first goal at the 33-minute mark of the first half.

In the second half, the Lady Penguins were more active on offense and nearly tied the game when it recorded its first shot about seven minutes in. It would have been a thing of beauty as Mckenna Kimball's header to freshman Lauren Gollnick was one-touched to Julianna Bratsberg down the right sideline. But Bratsberg's long shot rolled wide far side of the goal.

Gollnick also had a couple of other superb passes to Kaitlynn Baptista and Kimball that offered potential scoring opportunities.

In the end, Herring's seven saves, including a pair of goal-saving plays in the second half, led to a respectable effort by Dominican.

“We worked hard. We competed for a full 90 minutes,” said Delano. “We're progressing.”

The Lady Penguins return to PacWest action on Monday, Sept. 17 when they host Dixie State College. Game time at Kennelly Field at the John F. Allen Athletics complex is 4:00 p.m. Live stats will be available at http://www.dominicanathletics.com/live.