A Starr was born on Papé Field on Sunday afternoon.
Senior Starr Johnson, the Oregon soccer team’s long-time defender/midfielder, scored the first and second goals of her career in the same game to lift the Ducks over Portland State, 4-2.
Chalise Baysa scored her fifth goal of the season, tying her for the most on the team, and Beth Bowler added another for Oregon, which extended its best-ever starting record to 6-2-1. The Pilots fell to 0-9-2 on the season.
“I was tremendously happy for her,” Oregon head coach Bill Steffen said of Johnson’s pair of goals. “She’s a good person, and you like to see good people rewarded like that.”
Johnson’s first goal came midway through the first half. In the 16th minute, freshman forward Nicole Garbin streaked down the sideline and dished to Baysa near the goal mouth. When Portland State goalie Gretchen Pietras lunged for Baysa, the senior casually flipped the ball to Johnson, who netted the goal easily.
“I got my goal,” Johnson said. “I wanted to get one, because I’m a senior, and I haven’t put one in yet.”
Four minutes after Johnson’s goal, Bowler put the Ducks up 2-0 with her fourth goal of the season, a rocket of a shot from 20 yards that slipped in the bottom left corner of the net.
In the second half, Johnson again wasted little time in scoring her second goal. Six minutes into the second frame, Johnson dribbled the ball at the top of the 18-yard box, turned in traffic and fired a shot into the lower left corner past Pietras.
Baysa added a goal three minutes later on a bizarre play, when her shot off a corner kick was saved by Pietras — but on the wrong side of the endline. The referee called a goal on the play.
Johnson had a chance to score a hat trick before leaving the game for good. With 35 minutes left in the game, Johnson took a shot that from 10 feet that beat Pietras, but hit the cross bar.
When Steffen yanked his starters shortly after Baysa’s goal, Portland State dominated the rest of the contest, and scored two goals on Oregon backup goalkeeper Domenique Lainez. The first came with 11 minutes left in the game, when the Pilots’ Lori Mansoor took a corner kick that was put in by Amy Orr amid the ensuing confusion in front of the Oregon net.
Nine minutes after Orr’s goal, the Ducks suffered another embarrassing goal on the feet of Melanie Langley. With three minutes left in the game, Lainez and senior defender Angela Romero ran into each other as they were going for a ball at the corner of the 18-yard box. The ball squirted free, and Langley put it into the empty net.
“I think we learned a lesson. You can’t let your guard down, you can’t play sloppy,” Steffen said. “Now, the question is, can we learn from that?”
Steffen and his team will have to learn quickly, because the Ducks open conference play next weekend against No. 6 California on Friday, and No. 7 Stanford on Sunday. The Ducks will have home-field advantage, which has been vital to their success this season, over the top-ranked teams. With the win Sunday, the Ducks moved to 5-1 at home this season.