Women's Soccer: Going shot for shot with Pont

I was waiting outside Roberts Stadium on a cold and rainy Friday. My assignment was to have a penalty-kick contest against Alyssa Pont, the junior starting goalkeeper for the women’s soccer team.

This was no small task, considering that Pont, a first-team All-Ivy League player last year, once had a 703-minute shutout streak in net and was currently going on 273 minutes without allowing a goal.

Despite her sterling track record, I had confidence in my abilities. I played soccer through ninth grade, then took two years off before coming back for my senior season in high school. In fact, arguably my greatest personal sports memory had come while I was on my eighth-grade soccer team, when I scored the winning goal with less than a minute left in the semifinals of the county tournament. At Princeton, I often moonlight as a competent intramural soccer player and have certainly attempted my fair share of penalty kicks over the course of my life.

At the very least, I figured I would fare much better than I had during a similar article assignment in my freshman year, when I had played a game of H-O-R-S-E against the best shooter on the women’s basketball team. Despite what I thought was a good shooting day, I was annihilated HORSE-H (five letters to one) in back-to-back games.

In my efforts to erase the pain of that loss, I was largely successful, but sadly, the end result of my latest shot at sports glory was the same.

Before Pont and I began our shooting contest, I asked her about her mindset while defending a penalty kick. A large part of blocking a penalty kick, she said, was luck, but there were certain things she did to create a competitive advantage.

The keeper’s penalty-kick routine entailed first jumping up and down to look like she was taking up a large portion of the goal. She would stare down the shooter to try to get a read on what she was thinking and then do her best to read the shot once the ball was struck.

Our contest was a basic penalty-kick shootout. Five shots each, and whoever made the most would be the winner.

As I got ready for my first shot, Pont began spreading her arms wide and moving side-to-side. Not to be deterred, I lined up my first shot and curled it low into the back-right corner. Pont dove to her right, but the shot evaded her grasp. Goal.

Pont was impressed. “I knew where that shot was going, but it was too good,” she told me. I was beaming.

On my second shot, I went for more of the same, hitting the ball to a similar spot in the net. Two-for-two. Then I decided to stir up the pot. I shot the ball to my left, which is my weaker side when it comes to penalty kicks. This definitely showed as I played a low shot that Pont was able to deflect away on a quick dive to her left. Two-for-three. I asked her if she had known where that shot was going. “Yeah,” she responded. “Your body angle gave it away.”

I decided to go back to the basics, hitting my next shot to the back-right corner of the net for a third time. Three-for-four. Then, wanting to prove that I could make a shot to my right, I hit the ball a little harder to that side and got enough air under the shot that it went over the outstretched arms of the diving keeper. Four-for-five.

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Now it was my turn in net. I stand at a little less than five feet, eight inches tall, so taking up a large portion of the goal is certainly something that did not come easily. No matter — I did my best to jump up and down, spread out my arms and look as big as possible.

Though Pont had admittedly not attempted a penalty kick in recent memory, you couldn’t tell by the precise placement of her shots. On her first shot, I dove right, her shot went left, and it easily found the back of the net. I remarked that she had been looking to my right, which had caused my misguided dive. “That was the point,” she said.

Doing my best to read her shot on her second try, I correctly dove to my left, but the ball was far beyond my short grasp. In the middle of my dive, I heard a clang, looked up and saw that the ball had hit the crossbar and bounced away. The keeper was now one-for-two. She had to make her next three shots, or I would win.

Pont’s third shot easily beat me to my right side. Two-for-three. On the next shot, I guessed that the ball was going to my right — I was correct, surprisingly — and I blocked the ball with the bottom of my right arm. Or at least that’s what I thought.

By some freak occurrence of bad form and a wet field, the ball had slipped under my arm and rolled behind me. I turned around to see that the ball had found a resting space one foot behind the goal line — it hadn’t even reached the back of the net. Nevertheless, it was a goal. Pont breathed a huge sigh of relief. “You almost just won,” she said. I groaned, thinking about how close I had just come to sneaking away with an improbable win. Pont was now three-for-four, and she needed one more shot to tie the contest. She converted on that last try with little effort.

We were now knotted up at four, which meant it was time for sudden death. Pont and I would now trade shots until one of us scored a goal and the other missed. On my first shot, I started feeling some pressure, but I calmed my nerves enough to curve the ball into the right-side pocket of the goal — my best shot of the day.

Pont needed to make her next shot to stay alive. Before taking the shot, she remarked, “Now I’m starting to feel a little nervous.”

Once again, I guessed right, but this time her kick came just above my arms and glanced off my right hand before going in the goal. We were headed for a second round of sudden death.

I decided to shoot the ball to my right again. I hit the ball a little closer to the middle than I had expected. For the seventh time in a row, Pont guessed correctly, and this time, she was able to stick up her right leg to block my shot. I grimaced as the ball bounced away from the goal.

Pont had one shot to clinch the win. As the ball was hit, I dove right and low, but the ball sailed above my head and into the top of the net. Having clinched the 6-5 win, she seemed relieved and even a little excited.

Though I had put forth a good showing, to lose by such a narrow margin was in some ways more painful than being blown out in a game of H-O-R-S-E. On the bright side, my goals were the only ones that Pont allowed on the weekend. (After all, Princeton and Columbia battled to a scoreless tie the following day.)

Since we still had some time left before the team started its next practice, Pont gave me a quick lesson in punting. As I tried to master the timing of my steps on each punt, Pont blasted a few into the back half of the center circle. My punts, though well-hit, always ended up a little shorter. Then on our final punts, Pont had a bit of a shank and hit her shortest punt of the day. I followed by hitting the ball high and a bit to the left, but it managed to roll an inch past Pont’s — the soccer equivalent of winning by a nose. To say I wasn’t a bit excited would be a lie.

Then I asked her if I could take a few long-range shots from outside the 18-yard box. Blocking these shots, she said, was her specialty.

After mis-hitting my first shot, which weakly rolled to the right of the goal, I put a low shot on goal that Pont easily blocked. After sailing three over the net, I put a low drive on goal that she also knocked away.

With one shot left on the day, I hit what I thought was my best ball of the day. The shot bent a little bit in the air and had a good deal of pace, but it sailed inches over the crossbar. That pretty much summed up the day. Well, that and the fact that I struggled to move my right leg for the rest of the evening.