Dom Amore: For the seniors, Chioma Okafor ensures UConn women’s soccer season goes on
STORRS – The task before the UConn women’s soccer team was simple.
Don’t let it end. Don’t allow this Big East quarterfinal game be the last the seniors, including the fifth-year Husky veterans, ever play.
That was top of mind for sophomore Chioma Okafor all weekend, and especially when the opportunity sprung open before her.
“I saw the opportunity and I knew I had to make that goal,” Okafor said Sunday, in the happy moments at drizzly Morrone Stadium after lifting UConn to a 3-2 victory over Butler. “It was all on me at that point in time. The only thing I could think of then was to go celebrate with my team, because I knew that sealed the game.”
Okafor found open space on the left side of the field. Sophie McCarthy got her the ball and Okafor reprised what she had done in the first half, drawing goalkeeper Anna Piece into an impossible position and, chipping the ball over her head and softly into the net. “A big-time play from a big-time player,” coach Margaret Rodriguez said.
That gave UConn a 3-2 lead with 1:20 left, and that was the final score.
“You can see her, she’s different,” said Cromwell’s Cara Jordan, a fifth-year senior. “That’s the only way to put it. To chip the keeper twice in the game? That’s just her style, and you could see the dance moves after she scored, that’s just who she is. She’s incredible.”
Okafor, no relation to UConn basketball great Emeka Okafor, came from Blantyre, Malawi, and was playing at Berkshire School in Massachusetts when UConn coach Margaret Rodriguez showed up, randomly, she says, for an indoor tournament.
“I just kind of stumbled upon her and I knew there was something special about her at that moment,” Rodriguez said. “I had one conversation with her on the phone and I said, ‘this is my type of player.’ She’s so disciplined, respectful, wanting to get better every day. … Even when she has an off day, she is still dangerous for you on the field. She can rival some of the big time players in our program.”
Okafor leads UConn (10-3-5) with six goals of the 31 the team has scored. She also scored six as a freshman in 2022, making the Big East freshman and second teams.
“She’s going to be a huge player for UConn going forward,” said Jessica Mazo, who has been a huge player for the Huskies the past five seasons.
UConn has been eliminated in its first Big East Tournament game each of the last four years, twice by Butler, so the many experienced players had never gotten over this hurdle. Mazo, from St. Joseph-Trumbull, scored 2:02 into the game, converting a crossing pass from Jordan, and the way UConn had played defense all season — seven goals allowed in 17 games— that would normally have been enough.
“This game means everything,” said Mazo, who has four goals from her midfield position, wiping away a few tears. “We’d been here (four) years before and lost, and we felt we could have gone farther. This year we weren’t going to let that happen. Now we have people crying, and I’m a fifth-year, this game means everything for me.”
Said Jordan: “At the end of the day, we were going to do everything we could to make this not be our last game. There’s a group of us who have been in this spot four years in a row now, and we’ve lost this game every year and this year we were like, ‘we’re not doing that again.'”
Mazo and Jordan are among 10 players from Connecticut on the UConn roster, and among 10 seniors and fifth-year players.
“I feel really lucky to have a fifth year and still be here,” said Jordan, who has five goals and three assists. “Four years wouldn’t have been enough. I want to keep going. This team is a really special team to be a part of,”
Okafor used her breakout speed, her head and her toes, to score on a breakaway and chip shot at 24:40, making it 2-0. But Butler scored late in the first half and midway through the second to tie the game.
“I didn’t want to go to overtime,” Rodriguez said. “I thought we were losing a little steam, but I thought we had the team to finish it. I thought if we got one or two more chances, we would push one in there.”
So as regulation time was running out, the Huskies were staring at the possibility of two 10-minute overtimes, followed by penalty kicks. Anything could have happened. They couldn’t sit back in a defensive posture, they had to push for a goal. And when Okafor scored it, the Huskies punched a ticket to a semifinal game at Georgetown Thursday night and, very likely, to their first NCAA Tournament berth since 2016, however they fare the rest of the way in the conference tournament.
“We won for them,” Okafor said. “Today was for the seniors and for the fifth years. And I said it even in the beginning. And I didn’t want it to go into penalty kicks, so I had to leave it all there for them. This game was for them.”
