It was a breezy September evening in Cheney, Wash., and the Long Beach State women’s soccer team was playing Eastern Washington.
It was supposed to be an easy match against a struggling team before LBSU had to play a more difficult Gonzaga squad two days later.
But it wasn’t going as planned and LBSU was tied 1-1 in the second half. Then, in the 57th minute, Eastern Washington scored what turned out to be the game-winning goal on one of the most bizarre and embarrassing goals you can think of.
It was a goalie’s worst nightmare.
Liz Ramos started playing soccer when she was five years old while growing up in the Central Californian town of Paso Robles. Her family would later move to Bakersfield, but it didn’t stop Ramos from being on the soccer field.
When she was 13, she joined the city’s traveling team, the Bakersfield Gunners. Her new coach thought it would be a good idea to turn Ramos into a goalie, but Ramos didn’t jump at the opportunity.
“I didn’t want to be a goalie at first, but I got used to it, and I soon learned to like it,” Ramos said.
Ramos decided at an early age that she wanted to play Division I college soccer, but at times she thought she was stranded in the isolation that can come with being from Bakersfield.
“There were some players who had played on my traveling team that went to Cal State Bakersfield, but Bakersfield is a Division II program,” Ramos said. “I told myself that I was not going to college in Bakersfield, no matter what.”
What she didn’t know was an up-and-coming coach named Mauricio Ingrassia had gotten a tip from an assistant coach as the University of San Diego about a goalie named Ramos.
“[The assistant] told me that there was this goalie who they took a long look at but decided to go in another direction and that I should check her out,” Ingrassia said.
Ingrassia then recruited her for his Olympic Development Program team, Cal South, and all of a sudden Ramos wasn’t playing in Bakersfield anymore.
“I was so thankful I got discovered. I really was lucky,” Ramos said. “Sometimes I had to travel two and a half hours to go to practice from Bakersfield. It was a challenge, but it was worth it.”
Ingrassia had just taken over the head coaching position at LBSU and decided to bring his Cal South goalie with him to LBSU.
Ramos beat out two upperclassmen for the goalkeeping duties and was the starting goalie for LBSU as a freshman.
She went on to have the most successful season of any goalie in LBSU history. Ramos had a 12-4-3 record, raked up 10 shutouts and had a 0.66 goals against average, which ranked 22nd nationally.
Ramos had a successful first season, but before the 2006 season started, Ingrassia and the other LBSU coaches sat Ramos down and told her she had to make an improvement in her game.
“[The coaches] told me that I needed to be more vocal on the field and be a leader,” Ramos said.
Ingrassia believes goalies must not just have physical skills, but also the leadership skills.
“A team needs to have confidence in their goalie,” Ingrassia said. “The team must know they have someone in the back they can count on and can tell them what to do. If the team doesn’t, then the other players are looking over their shoulders and they aren’t pushing forward.”
With a year under her belt, Ramos was feeling more confident this season than the last. It showed at the start of the year. Ramos was 7-1 in her first eight starts, with six shutouts, and had only given up two goals all season.
Then came Eastern Washington.
It was a play Ramos had done ever since she was a 13-year-old goalie with the Bakersfield Gunners.
The ball was rolling to her and all she had to do was kick it to safety, like she had done thousands of times in soccer career. But this time when she went to kick the ball she swung and missed.
The ball rolled behind her, and an Eastern Washington player tapped it in for a goal.
“I was really upset,” Ramos said. “Mauricio talked to me after the game and told me that I needed to learn from the experience so the loss wouldn’t be for nothing.”
Tara Gotthardt is the backup goalie and is one of the few seniors on LBSU team.
“I talked to her after the match and told her things like that happen to everyone and that she needed to put it behind her and move on,” Gotthardt said.
Ramos had little choice but to shake off the loss and try and regain her confidence as soon as possible, because LBSU was playing a tough Gonzaga squad two days later.
“I wanted to take responsibility for what happened, but I also wanted to show my teammates that they shouldn’t lose confidence in me and that I was a leader,” Ramos said.
Against Gonzaga, Ramos had three saves, and thanks to a Kim Silos goal in overtime, LBSU left Washington with a win.
“I did what I needed to do,” Ramos said about the Gonzaga match. “Throughout the match I kept thinking about being a leader and playing with confidence. I was happy we won the game. If we lost it could have been one of the worst weekends of the year.”
Instead of letting one mistake ruin her season, Ramos has rebounded and has had one of the greatest seasons by any goalie in Big West history.
The sophomore keeper currently has the lowest goals against average of any goalie in Big West history (0.55) and tied the conference shutout record with 11.
“The only way to become a better goalie is through experience,” Ramos said. “The older you the get, the more situations you see and you learn from each one of them. I definitely think what happened [against Eastern Washington] has made me a better goalie.”
