It’s Touch and Go for Ventura, 1-0

WEST HILLS —  For 120 minutes of playoff soccer between the Ventura High and Chaminade girls’ teams Wednesday, Kitty Sexton barely touched the ball.

But when the scoreless match moved to a shootout, it was Sexton, the Ventura goalkeeper, who made the difference.

A 5-foot-7 freshman, Sexton stopped three of five Chaminade penalty kicks in the shootout while Micayla Drew, Mandy Enfield and Sarah Costello scored to lift the Cougars to a 1-0 victory in the Southern Section Division II wild-card match.

Ventura (15-5-5), the Channel League’s third-place team, advanced to a first-round match at Temple City on Friday.

Ventura won at Chaminade (15-9-2) in a first-round match last season and reached the quarterfinals.

Wednesday, Sexton was anything but composed after 80 minutes of regulation and 40 minutes of overtime.

“Before [the shootout] started I was crying because I was nervous,” Sexton said. “But everyone came around and comforted me and pumped me up. It worked.”

Sexton denied Tami Pivnick and Amy Watts, allowed goals by Vanessa Thiele and Kerrie Clavadetscher and clinched the victory by diving to deflect a waist-high shot by Lauren Chew.

“They tell you to never look at the person, to look at the ball,” said Sexton, who split time for most of the season with junior Marisa Gaines. “But I looked at their first couple of shooters and they looked nervous. So I just smiled at them and luckily made the right guesses about where they’d shoot.”

There was little shooting in the physical field play leading up to Sexton’s heroics. Opposing players collided frequently and passing became a lost art on the hard field.

“It was a real defensive game but not a real well-played game,” said fifth-year Ventura Coach Mike Ishihara.

Ishihara credited center midfielder Roxanne Pena’s determined play for keeping Chaminade, the second-place team out of the Mission League, at bay.

“Roxanne was able to push people around in the middle,” Ishihara said. “We said coming in that we wouldn’t let them score.”