Bruin Bites: UCLA Women’s Soccer Ties UC Berkeley

Women’s Soccer

There’s an old saying in sports that "a tie is like kissing your sister." Well, perhaps, after last night’s UCLA Women’s Soccer game it might be time to update that to "a tie is like kissing your brother." But, said either way, it still means the same thing — nobody won and nobody liked it.

And, last night’s game probably feels more like that because the Bruins were playing UC Berkeley, UCLA’s older sibling from up North.

But, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t anything good to come out of last night’s game.

The Golden Bears took the lead in the 16th minute when Ifeoa Onumonu scored a top shelf goal after receiving the ball on an endline pass from Abigail Kim.

As I thought prior to the game, it proved to be a defensive battle. Bruin goalkeeper Teagan Micah notched 5 saves on 17 UC Berkeley shots on goal and Golden Bear goalkeeper Emily Boyd saved 11 of the UCLA’s 18 shots on goal.

UC Berkeley held the lead until the final minute of regulation when Courtney Proctor, a sixth-year senior starting in place of the injured Darian Jenkins, got her own rebound to tap home the equalizer.

But that was all the scoring for the match and neither team could pull out a win in either overtime period.

Here are last night’s highlights from the Pac-12 Network and UCLABruins.com.

Soccer

In other UCLA soccer news, Darian Jenkins is one of 30 candidates for the 2016 Senior CLASS Award for women’s soccer and Michael Amick is one of 30 candidates for the 2016 Senior CLASS Award for men’s soccer. To be eligible for these awards, a student-athlete must be classified as an NCAA Division I senior and have notable achievements in four areas of excellence - community, classroom, character and competition.

CLASS is an acronym for Celebrating Loyalty and Achievement for Staying in School® and the Senior CLASS Award focuses on the total student-athlete and encourages students to use their platform in athletics to make a positive impact as leaders in their communities.

The 30-player class will be narrowed to 10 finalists midway through the regular season, and those 10 names will be placed on the official ballot. Ballots will be distributed through a nationwide voting system to media, coaches and fans, who will select one male candidate and one female candidate who best exemplify excellence in the four Cs of community, classroom, character and competition.

The Senior CLASS Award winners will be announced during the 2016 NCAA Men's and Women's College Cup® championships in December.

Jurisprudence

Earlier this week, the United States Supreme Court rejected both appeals in Ed O’Bannon’s case against the NCAA.

The NCAA had appealed to reverse the lower court rulings that found amateurism rules for student-athletes violated federal antitrust law while O’Bannon appealed to reverse an appeals court ruling that eliminated a plan to allow student-athletes to be paid by their colleges and universities.

The decision to deny both appeals means that the case is now final.

According to an AP article on the LA Times website, "[t]he effect of the high court action is to leave the NCAA vulnerable to more legal challenges that are working their way through the courts."

Hopefully, the conclusion of this case will result in the return, in some form, of the EA Sports NCAA video games which sparked the case in the first place when Ed O’Bannon saw a friend’s child playing EA Sports NCAA Basketball with a classic UCLA team where a player had Ed’s number and resembled him.

In other UCLA Athletics legal news, former UCLA defensive back and team captain Tom Sullivan filed a class-action suit on behalf of every Bruin football player from 1959 to 2010 Tuesday against the Pac-12 Conference and the NCAA over lasting effects of concussions suffered playing football.

Among other things, the suit alleges that UCLA did not have "adequate concussion management protocols" in place until at least 2010.

The full text of the initial filing is included below.

Sullivan v Pac-12 and the NCAA on Scribd

Go Bruins!!!