The Hawaii women\u2019s soccer team saw its Big West tournament hopes dashed in a 2-1 loss at Cal State Bakersfield on Sunday night.<\/p>\n
Jaiden Gore slotted the winner past goalkeeper Kennedy Justin in the 63rd minute and the Rainbow Wahine could not put in a tying shot to remain mathematically alive with one regular-season game remaining.<\/p>\n
Realistically, UH (4-7-8, 2-3-4 Big West), with 10 points in the Big West table, needed to win Sunday have a shot of finishing in the top six. Instead, CSUB (8-7-2, 5-3-1) clinched a spot and kept the Wahine out of range of sixth-place UC Irvine (15 points) going into a matchup against the Anteaters on senior night at the Waipio Soccer Complex on Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone knew going into the game that it was a must-win situation, which is hard to play through that kind of pressure,\u201d UH coach Michele Nagamine told Spectrum News in a postgame phone interview.<\/p>\n
It started well enough. Izzy Ayala got the Wahine on the board in the fourth minute with a header off Alice Davidson\u2019s corner kick.<\/p>\n
Mya Clarke got it back for CSUB in the 23rd.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe scored first on a set piece, and they scored on two set pieces. It\u2019s tough when things go down that way,\u201d Nagamine said. \u201cPlaying Bakersfield at home, it is a tall order. Them and Riverside are probably the two hardest places to play at, just because those fields are very, very dark and they\u2019re very, very good at home.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those are concerns of a Big West era that is drawing to an imminent close. Thursday will mark the end of the program\u2019s 13-season BWC tenure, during which UH made three conference tournaments and went one-and-done in those appearances.<\/p>\n
UH soccer will take a 17-year NCAA Tournament drought into the Mountain West Conference in 2026. The program won the Big West regular-season championship for the first and only time in 2024, which allowed UH to host the BWC championship but did not result in a run to the NCAAs.<\/p>\n
A follow-up effort proved difficult, the 15th-year coach Nagamine said, due to myriad factors that included unavailability of UH\u2019s new on-campus practice field until midseason and a handful of players suffering season-ending injuries and illnesses.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe lack of field, it\u2019s been brutal, having all these moving pieces and less time on the field because there\u2019s so many moving pieces being in transit (to other practice sites),\u201d Nagamine said. \u201cSome people will say it\u2019s an excuse, but we\u2019re just dealing with the facts here.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact is, it\u2019s been a rough, rough season from an adversity standpoint.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said the program will now prepare to honor its nine outgoing seniors Thursday as they would if they were still in tournament contention.<\/p>\n
Brian McInnis<\/a>\u00a0covers the state\u2019s sports scene for Spectrum News Hawaii.\u00a0He can be reached at\u00a0brian.mcinnis@<\/a>charter.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Hawaii women\u2019s soccer team saw its Big West tournament hopes dashed in a 2-1 loss at Cal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25262,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[19375,6632,6631,151,153,152,19376,1815,2289,127,136],"class_list":["post-25261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bakersfield","tag-app-college-sports","tag-app-sports","tag-app-top-stories","tag-bakersfield","tag-bakersfield-headlines","tag-bakersfield-news","tag-brian-mcinnis","tag-college","tag-hawaii","tag-sports","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}