Las Vegas goalie scores stunning 100-yard goal

One of the cool things about sports is that one never knows when one is going to witness something amazing.

It could happen at Yankee Stadium. It could happen at a Little League field, or on a dusty sandlot after kids choose up sides, provided kids still do that. Remember when little Timmy Lupus caught the ball? That was pretty amazing.

It might be Mickey Mantle who does something spectacular.

It might be Bucky Dent.

It might be somebody you’ve never heard of.

Say, for instance, you were at a bowling alley, and a guy wearing an Ed’s Conoco bowling shirt picked up the 7-10 split.

That would be pretty spectacular, even if you never heard of that guy.

On Sunday, it was a goalkeeper for the Las Vegas Premier Soccer Academy girls under-18 team who did something spectacular in a preliminary game for the Nevada State Cup at Bettye Wilson Soccer Complex.

It happened on Field No. 3.

It was something you almost never see in a soccer game at any level, even if you were Mike or Carol Brady, and even if Greg, Marcia, Peter, Jan, Bobby and Cindy all played youth soccer at the same time.

Lauren Surick, the LVPSA goalie, kicked the ball toward the opposite end of the pitch from her own 18-yard box. In the manner of one of those NFL punters who outkicks his coverage, she outkicked the forward for whom she was aiming.

By a lot.

She went Ray Guy. She said there was a slight breeze at her back.

The ball landed just outside the Warrior FC 18-yard box. The ball bounced once, over the head of the other goalie who was off her line, as they say in soccer.

It bounced again.

It bounced into the net.

Lauren Surick, the goalkeeper, whose job it is to prevent goals, had scored one in the most remarkable of fashions.

She had scored a goal by booting the soccer ball the length of a regulation field, which is 110 yards. You hardly ever see that in the English Premier League, or La Liga in Spain, or the Bundesliga in Germany, or Serie A in Italy.

You never see it in a girls’ 18-under game.

The youthful keeper said the people who bore witness to it went crazy, folks, went crazy. Like Ozzie Smith against the Dodgers in the playoffs.

“Everybody was in disbelief. Especially my dad on the sideline,” Surick said.

Lauren Surick is the daughter of Mike and Kristal Surick of Las Vegas. She is a senior at Liberty High. She has been playing soccer since she was a little girl.

Now she’s a big girl — she’s 6 feet tall, and in the fall she will attend Barry University in Miami Shores, Fla., where she will play goalie for a side that has won three NCAA Division II national championships.

She probably will never score another goal like the one she scored on Sunday, though.

She said that was her first goal in a game since she played forward in the younger age groups, when soccer was played in scrums that every so often would move when the ball moved.

That was before she grew tall and switched to keeper and started understanding the angles, which is what every good goalie must do.

“I didn’t know what to think,” Surick said about kicking the ball over the head of her target forward, and over everybody else’s heads, too, and into the net.

“Does this count? I didn’t even know if this counts.”

She thought there might be a rule in soccer where another player had to touch the ball before the keeper could score a goal.

There is no video of Lauren Surick’s goal. There probably would have been, had she not recently signed her letter-of-intent. Mike Surick shot video of almost all of his daughter’s games because you never know when the college scouts are going to want to see video.

Just for the heck of it, I looked on YouTube. I found a video of 10 spectacular goalie goals that some kid from Russia had put together. Only one, by American Tim Howard, playing for the English side Everton against Bolton, came from his own 18-yard box.

Howard’s goal bounced only once before sailing over the head of his stunned and off-his-line counterpart and finding the net.

That should give Lauren Surick something to shoot for when she goes to college down in Florida.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.