Young UCLA Ready for a Chance at Greatness

Jillian Ellis says she is impatient by nature. She came to UCLA with the idea that the Bruins would compete for the national title sooner rather than later.

Ellis has been the Bruin women’s soccer coach for only two years, but she already is positioning the program toward elite status. UCLA can make a name for itself tonight against Portland in the national semifinals of the NCAA Women’s College Cup at San Jose’s Spartan Stadium.

It is a Final Four packed with powerhouse teams. Portland has been in the national semifinals five times in the last seven years and reached the title match in 1995. Notre Dame, the 1995 champion, is the nation’s top-ranked team and was a finalist last season.

Then there is North Carolina. The Tar Heels have won a record 15 NCAA titles and have supplied the U.S. women’s national team with such superstars as Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly and Carla Overbeck.

UCLA has none of the experience. The Bruins’ best tournament finish was the third round in 1997.

So the Bruins are just happy to be along for the ride, right?

“We’re not just happy to get there,” Ellis said. “It’s about getting it done and winning the whole thing.”

To help emphasize that, Ellis enlisted UCLA softball Coach Sue Enquist to serve as a motivational speaker during practice Tuesday night. Ellis figured Enquist could provide perspective on the task at hand.

“She’s won a lot of national championships and she knows what it’s like,” Ellis said. “Basically Sue said, ‘Don’t get caught up in the hoopla. What you’re really going there to do is play a 90-minute game.’ ”

This is the very stage Ellis wanted when she applied for the job in 1999 after a two-year stint as coach at Illinois and several years as an assistant at Virginia and Clemson.

While at Virginia under April Heinrichs, now the U.S. women’s national team coach, she got to see North Carolina’s dominance up close.

“My hope was to build one of the elite programs in the country,” she said. “This place is a gold mine. In California, you can play year-round. It has the most talent in the country.

“There are so many positives about this place that I thought it was only a matter of time.”

Ellis said she owes much of the Bruins’ success to previous coaches Joy Fawcett and Todd Saldana. Fawcett won 65 matches and had a .714 winning percentage in five years and Saldana was 17-4-1 in 1998 before taking over the men’s program.

“The program has been here eight years and has been competitive,” Ellis said. “To come into a program that had two coaches direct it in such a positive way, it made my job much easier.”

But Ellis has added her stamp. Ellis has recruited locally and nationally, with players coming from as near as San Pedro and Orange and as far as Florida, New York and Texas.

UCLA had the No. 1 recruiting class in the nation and its regular lineup includes four freshmen, forwards Sarah-Gayle Swanson and Staci Duncan and midfielders Lindsay Greco and Whitney Jones.

Swanson, who leads the team with 14 goals, said she thought it would take another year to become a legitimate contender.

“I can’t imagine anything better than this right now,” she said. “We’ve got [10] freshmen, and a lot of us are impact players. Even if we don’t win it this year, if we keep working hard and keep winning, we’ll win a title [soon].

“We’re on our way.”

Other young players like Greco can’t help but think the program is ready to rack up national titles.

“I think we’ll stay on top if we keep getting the good recruits,” she said. “Our time is coming.”

UCLA has advanced this far with little contribution from Nandi Pryce, its most heralded recruit. Pryce, an alternate for the U.S. Olympic team, broke her left leg in the sixth game of the season. Pryce felt so strongly about UCLA that she turned down North Carolina, Florida and Stanford as arguably the nation’s top high school player out of Castleberry, Fla.

“My main reason in coming here was to win a national championship,” she said.

Their time is now.

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NCAA Women’s Soccer Cup

At Spartan Stadium, San Jose:

TONIGHT’S SEMIFINALS

* Fifth-seeded North Carolina (19-3-0) vs. top-seeded Notre Dame (23-0-1), 5 p.m.

* Sixth-seeded UCLA (18-3-1) vs. unseeded Portland (18-3-0), 7:30 p.m.

SUNDAY’S FINAL

* North Carolina-Notre Dame winner vs. UCLA-Portland winner, 12:30 p.m.

Note: The semifinals will be shown, delayed, on ESPN2 Saturday at noon and 2 p.m. Sunday’s championship final will be shown live on ESPN2.