Moreno Doesn’t Let Pain Keep Her Down : Soccer: Despite numerous injuries, El Modena goalkeeper has continued to play well.

Playing with pain is an occasional necessity for most athletes, but El Modena goalkeeper Amy Moreno might have set a standard last season.

Moreno’s injury report:

--Left leg: partially torn ankle ligaments, strained Achilles’ tendon, pulled calf muscle.

--Right leg: pulled hamstring, pulled quadriceps.

--Back: bad.

“I was a mess,” Moreno said. “Every part of my body seemed like it was injured. My trainer said I should invest in tape.”

Desiree Baker, the trainer, said most would have been sidelined by the injury to either the hamstring or the quadriceps.

“I think she had the record,” said Baker, a senior in the athletic training program at Chapman University. “I would see her in the training room with six or seven bags of ice on different parts of her body.

“I thought it was incredible that she could play with those injuries.”

Yet Moreno always passed the tests Baker put her through before clearing her to play; although Moreno could barely walk away from the field, she wasn’t limping when she jogged to the goal for each of the Vanguards’ Southern Section playoff games.

“Not once did we hear a moan or a complaint,” El Modena Coach Tino Ray Younger said. “She just said, ‘Tape me up. I’m going in.’

“She’s the toughest girl athlete that I’ve ever seen in terms of pain tolerance.”

After the games, Moreno’s legs went into shutdown mode. She would spend the next day in bed.

“My teachers were pretty cool about it because we were in the playoffs,” Moreno said. “They always knew I wouldn’t be there the day after a game because I could barely walk.”

This season, Moreno is in much better shape, although she had some anxious moments in the fall. In August, she injured her knee at a goalkeepers camp, and in late September, she aggravated the injury playing in a club game. But with acupuncture therapy and diligent rehabilitation the knee now is fine.

Or so Moreno says. She’s been known to fib about how badly she’s injured. “If she had broken her leg, she would try to play on it--that’s how she is,” Baker said. “She’s very stubborn.”

Moreno brushes off such talk. Sure, she feels the pain of her injuries, but to her it is more excruciating to stand idly on the sidelines.

It’s this type of determination that the Vanguards have come to expect from Moreno, who is in her fourth year as a starter.

“She’s put her life and blood and guts into the team for the past three years, and it’s nice that her goals seem to be finally coming to fruition,” Younger said.

Halfway through the Century League season, El Modena (14-4, 5-0 in league) is in first place and closing in on its first league title in girls’ soccer. Moreno has allowed 12 goals in 17 games for the Vanguards--one more than she allowed in 23 games last season.

But the Vanguards, who are ranked No. 4 in Orange County and No. 2 in the Southern Section Division II, have a tougher schedule this season--two-thirds of the goals (eight) have come against No. 1 Marina, No. 2 Edison, No. 3 Capistrano Valley and No. 9 El Toro.

Furthermore, the defense in front of Moreno is inexperienced, only junior Erin Warren and sophomore Laurie Zemke were starters last year.

But expect no excuses from Moreno, who fumes when a ball gets past her.

“Sometimes she’s too critical of herself,” Younger said. “She puts too much pressure on herself to make every save. I’ve told her for three years, ‘The ball has to come through 10 other people before it gets to you.’ ”

When it does get through, however, Moreno is usually in position to turn the other team away, a fact that has attracted attention from college coaches at UCLA, USC, UC Davis and Pepperdine, among others.

In December at the Foothill Excalibur tournament, one of the strongest high school tournaments in Southern California, she was the only goalkeeper on the all-tournament team. She was especially steady in penalty kick shootouts, the way ties were settled. Moreno stopped four of eight penalty kicks as the Vanguards beat West Hills Chaminade and Capistrano Valley.

Despite her hobbled condition last season in the playoffs, she made spectacular saves that kept the Vanguards close in a 2-1 overtime victory over La Habra in the first round and a 1-0 victory over Alta Loma in the second. Arcadia, the eventual champion, then beat El Modena, 2-0, in a quarterfinal, but not before Moreno was moved to forward to try to spark the offense.

“She’s always making the saves to keep us in it and give us the chance to win,” Younger said.

When Moreno joined the team as a freshman, Younger didn’t have such high expectations. She had been a forward for her club team, but the Vanguards needed a goalkeeper. Moreno remembers her first tryout: “Tino basically lined a bunch of people up and said, ‘Catch.’ ”

Moreno won the starting position, and Younger says he remembers thinking that she would do a more than adequate job. An injury forced her to sit out El Modena’s first game, an 8-0 loss. The rest of the season, Moreno allowed 18 goals in 21 games and recorded 10 shutouts.

Since then, she has started every game of significance, making saves that leave her coaches shaking their heads. For instance, last season with El Modena trailing, 1-0, against La Habra in the playoffs, La Habra’s Amber Duarte took a hard shot from about 18 yards that seemed certain to find the net.

“It’s raining, absolutely soaking wet,” Younger said. “It would have been a good play just to knock it over the goal. How she holds onto it I have no idea.

“She does these things and on the sideline we always look at each other and say, “Are you kidding me, right now?’ ”