The following story ran in the Spring 2023 Issue of Bruin Blue Magazine.
By Jon Gold
The phone call is supposed to happen around 4 p.m. on a mid-January Friday, but Madelyn Desiano is not picking up.
It’s been a whirlwind 24 hours for the UCLA graduate defender. The previous day, she was announced as the final pick of the National Women’s Soccer League Draft by the Houston Dash, and now she’s dashing home from Philadelphia, where the draft was held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
She was supposed to have landed midday, but her flight has been delayed. It turns out, she’s stuck in the clouds.
But forget her flight home — Desiano has been floating above 10,000 feet for more than weeks, ever since she played one of several pivotal roles in one of the greatest goals in collegiate soccer history.
She’s not coming down any time soon, and neither are her teammates.
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To truly understand how UCLA pulled off perhaps the best comeback in championship game history on Dec. 5, a 3-2 win over North Carolina after being behind 2-0 with under 10 minutes left, you must go back to last December.
On Dec. 29, 2021, former Stanford assistant coach Margueritte Aozasa was named the sixth head coach in Bruins soccer history. Aozasa vowed not to just usher in a new era of UCLA women’s soccer, but a new age. A different approach, filled with empathy and fueled by patience, soccer not as a metaphor for war but one for peace.
“From day one, Marg established trust,” Desiano said. “We had individual meetings, and this time last year was all about her getting to know us. From very early on, the team knew trust was big, and trust both ways.”
By the beginning of the 2022 campaign, the Bruins were fully bought in to Aozasa’s style, and an early season Tobacco Road sweep at Duke and North Carolina only went to further the Bruins’ bravado. On Sept. 1, UCLA won 2-1 over the Blue Devils and, three days later, beat the top-ranked Tar Heels by the same score. Star junior forward Reilyn Turner had the game-winning goal in both big wins.
“Having new coaches this past year, we’ve had to adjust, and lucky for us, it was a seamless adjustment,” Turner said. “They came into this program and enforced positivity, and we started off extremely strong. Our first trip to North Carolina in the…
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