Women of Troy win 21-6 on Senior Day


By
 in ,

No. 3 USC (21-2, 4-1) played a fantastic game on Senior Day Saturday against No. 8 San Jose State (19-8, 0-5) resulting in a 21-6 win. Saturday was the last home game for seniors Eike Daube, Monica Vavic, Sara Salamon and Jennifer Stiefel, who collectively scored seven of the 21 goals on the day. But for Daube, she wouldn’t want to go out another way.

“It’s pretty surreal realizing that it’s been four years, and I’m gonna miss it,” Daube said. “It’s been a great four years and I wouldn’t want to finish it off with any other group of girls.”

Emotions ran high on Senior Day, but during the game, the Women of Troy were focused on the task at hand. San Jose State jumped out with the first goal before USC answered with three straight goals. SJSU kept the game close, however, and early in the second quarter scored to make it 4-3. As Vavic said, the Women of Troy began to make changes around this point.

“We changed our offensive game,” Vavic said. “In the very beginning of the game we were getting [some calls against us which led to] automatic turnovers, so that was taking out of our halfcourt offense, but we started making some adjustments, making better releases and changing that aspect of the game so we could continue to attack on offense and then we also started pushing our fastbreak more at the beginning of the game. San Jose was creating a lot of fastbreak opportunities against us and that switched and that also helped change the momentum of the game.”

Then USC broke the game open with 12 unanswered scores with goals for several Trojans, including two goals for Avery Peterson, Brianna Daboub and Eike Daube. The score was 16-4 as the fourth quarter began. But the Women of Troy weren’t finished. Vavic would earn her second and third goals, Ioanna Haralabidis with her second goal, Daube with her third goal and senior Sara Salamon with her seventh career goal added to the beatdown, with the score at 21-6 when the final buzzer sounded. It was a team effort for the Women of Troy as 11 players would score for USC before the day’s end.

Next up for the Women of Troy is UCLA. The last time these two teams met, UCLA came out with a 5-3 victory. USC will be carrying a lot of momentum and confidence into this next matchup though with six straight wins and this great showing on senior day. Daube said USC’s senior day performance definitely helps boost team confidence for this UCLA showdown.

“I think any good offensive game is definitely something that makes you feel good about your shooting,” Daube said. “I think that’s what these games are meant to segway us into. It’s really good to see some of our freshmen pick it up and score when it needs to happen and get rebounds.”

The last matchup of the regular season will take place at UCLA at 1:00 p.m. on April 18.