The degree of difficulty alone makes it hard to believe anything about Aubrielle Camacho’s game-winning goal was planned.
The easy part was running the designed play to get in position, but the Los Osos High School sophomore midfielder flawlessly executed the hard part, propelling a 30-yard laser of a shot into the top corner of the goal with three minutes remaining in the second overtime to give the Grizzlies girls soccer team a 2-1 win over Westlake in the CIF-SS Division 2 quarterfinals on Friday.
After giving up an early breakaway goal, No. 2 seed Los Osos, ranked the No.1 team in the country by MaxPreps.com, trailed until Ifeoma Onumonu’s penalty kick tied the game in the 58th minute. Both teams had quality scoring chances down the stretch, but it wasn’t until Camacho’s heroics that Los Osos advanced to a semifinal meeting with Baseline League rival Upland after never having made it past the quarterfinals in school history.
“I had a feeling it was going in when it left my foot,” Camacho said. “I just saw an opening and I’m pretty accurate with my shot.”
\Los Osos (21-0-3) looked like the overwhelming favorite, putting heavy pressure on Marmonte League champion Westlake the first 25 minutes of the game, but none of the Grizzlies’ scoring chances required Westlake goalie Laura Rivera to make a save.
The lone exception to Los Osos’ dominance of possession was the first half’s only goal. Westlake’s Julia Ozello took a long clearing pass over the top, split two Los Osos defenders and found herself on a breakaway where the speedy forward got off a shot before Los Osos keeper Carissa Christenson could react.
“They are a great countering team,” Los Osos coach Mychal Armstrong said. “We knew
that. We knew what they were going to do but they just beat us. They out-hustled us.”
Ten minutes into the second half, Los Osos produced its best scoring chance to that point when forward Victoria Bolden ran past her defender to track down a loose ball and create a one-on-one with the goalie only to have her defender recover in time to poke the ball away just as she was firing a close-range shot.
With the chance to put a strangle hold on the game five minutes later, Westlake missed its own breakaway opportunity when Arielle Shipp’s shot was forced wide from a tough angle made more difficult by a fast-closing Christenson, who had seven saves.
Los Osos was ironically not in a threatening position when Onumonu was chasing a ball toward the end line in the corner of the box two minutes later. It proved to be a threat, however, when she was pushed from behind on the play, earning a penalty shot that she buried in the top right corner to tie the game in the 58th minute.
“To give up a soft PK like that, you want the game to be decided on the field not by a linesman making a call on something in the corner that I didn’t even think was a foul,” Westlake coach Frank Marino said. “That changed the momentum. It brought their crowd back into it. It changed the game.”
Westlake hardly appeared deflated by the equalizing goal, nearly scoring on a two-on-one that was whistled dead courtesy of an offsides penalty in the 60th minute. Los Osos answered with consecutive dangerous corner kicks by Bolden in the 73rd minute but one was deflected off the post and the other sailed untouched across the mouth of the goal.
Each goalie made clutch saves in the waning minutes of regulation beginning with Christenson’s diving effort to stop a shot in the midst of a scrum with less than five minutes to play. On the final play of regulation, a Los Osos corner kick, Chloe Watson lined up a close-range header but the shot was directly at the Westlake keeper.
