Oct. 7, 2007

It's the goal of the U.S. Women's Developmental Team to give the Elite squad its best competition in the years between World Championships. For about eight minutes on Saturday night, it appeared Devo was more than the first team could handle.

Consecutive goals by Katie Lewis-Lamonica, Caitlyn McFadden and Megan O'Malley over a span of four minutes sparked the Developmental squad to a 3-1 lead early in the first half, giving many of the 478 fans in attendance at the Tualatin Hill Athletic Complex in Beaverton, Ore., the feeling a national team roster reevaluation may be in the offing.

Chalk it up to nerves, lack of practice, or fatigue - the game started at 10 p.m. EDT for many of the East Coast natives who arrived late because of travel delays - but Sue Heether's Elite program quickly recovered from the deficit to throttle the upstarts, 23-12.

Heether wasn't terribly concerned about falling behind early; she was more interested to see how her kids would react to it.

"We know our butts are on the line and they're all trying to beat us because we're the king of the mountain right now," said Heether. "So when they come down and score I want to see composure, I don't want to see any panic. I wasn't worried about the goals; I was worried about how we would react to it."

"When that happened we said, okay, they are bringing their `A' game, but we have the talent and ability to fight back from that type of thing," said Elite attacker Mary Key, who scored all three of her goals in the first-half rally. "That really stems from energy because we were ready to keep up with them. You just have to dig deep and find the extra energy."

Leaning on a stifling defense and heady ball movement, Elite answered with five unanswered tallies, and 10 of the final 12 goals of the first half, to take an 11-5 lead that would never be threatened. Elite opened the second half with nine of the first 10 markers to balloon the lead to 20-6 with 18:03 left in the game.

Devo managed to outscore Elite 6-3 down the stretch after the outcome was assured.

"We played well the first five minutes and the last five minutes. It was the 50 minutes in between where we didn't play well," said Developmental coach Amy Patton. "I really give credit to Elite because they really put the pressure on us. But now we know in practice the standard we need to hold ourselves to."

Playing with a physical style that seemed to unnerve Devo at times, Elite owned most of the draws and were seemingly a step ahead on loose balls.

"I would say that 90 percent of the game they had possession and that was really due to the draws, so we were on defense that much more," said Patton. "The draw really comes down to guts, and they had it tonight."

Katie Chrest dominated on the draw while her former Duke teammate, Caroline Cryer, paced the offense with five goals and one assist. Quinn Carney added a hat trick in the victory.

Patton was disappointed her team was unable to give Elite a better game, but aims to rectify that by the next meeting.

"As the Devo team it is our job to give the Elite one of the toughest games of the year and we obviously didn't do that tonight," she said. "This was our first game of the year and we're going to play them at the end of the year in Disney. We really need to improve because we have to be their best competition."

"This is the best kind of competition we're ever going to get," said Heether, whose team rolled over Cal-Berkeley earlier in the afternoon, 19-1. "We're hungry, they're hungry. But at the end of the day we're all walking off as teammates because this is a unified team."

NOTES Elite's victory was bittersweet. Just 36 seconds into the game midfielder Kelly Berger, who had worked tirelessly to return from her second ACL tear, crumpled to the turf. An emotional Heether confirmed after the game that it was likely a third ACL tear. "It's always bad when this happens to a player, but it's worse that it happened to Kelly," said Heether, fighting back tears. "But she's a tough kid."...USL Women's Division Associate Liz Piper sang the National Anthem prior to the game...a huge ovation erupted in the stands during a first half timeout. It was the Stanford women's lacrosse team reacting to the news that the Cardinal football team had upset USC in football...Elite was missing Meredith Frank and Kristen Kjellman while Devo was without Holly McGarvie and Kristin Schwab.