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  JULIA PARK Staci Duncan overcame frustration and is UCLA's second all-time leading goal-scorer.

By Jeff Agase

Daily Bruin Staff

Her freshman year, she was UCLA’s leading scorer, a freshman All-American and All-Pac-10. She even got a feature story in the Daily Bruin.

Her sophomore year, she scored 10 goals, was All-Pac-10 and again was featured in the Daily Bruin.

Her senior year, she scored the game-winning goal against Stanford to clinch the Pac-10 title, became UCLA’s second all-time leading goal scorer and, well, you get the trend.

And in Staci Duncan’s junior year? Well, she was…

“Frustrated,” the senior forward said. “Here I am, I’m a junior and I’ve started every game here. Like any athlete, I wanted to be playing, but I wasn’t.”

The Bruins were creeping up the national rankings and on their way to a first-ever berth in the Final Four, but Duncan was absent from the starting lineup from mid-September on. She wasn’t injured. She was replaced.

A slew of freshman talent brought in by head coach Jillian Ellis, coupled with transfer forward Stephanie Rigamat’s first year of UCLA eligibility, meant there simply wasn’t space for Duncan up front.

“Sometimes players can get comfortable, and maybe Staci got comfortable her junior year,” Ellis said. “The younger players came in and really pushed all of the older players. It was a nice sort of eye-opener for them, to see they can’t just assume to play because they’re older players.”

For the first time in her life, Duncan wasn’t in the starting 11. Humbled but undaunted, she still scored eight goals and tallied three assists to place fifth on the team in scoring. She wasn’t angry, but she needed encouragement.

“Jill made me feel like I was right there,” Duncan said. “I just needed to keep working hard and keep doing what I was doing.

“I talked to friends on the team, and they were there for me as teammates and as friends. Without them, I don’t know how I would have stayed in good spirits.”

Duncan was forced to come off the bench in every Bruin playoff win, all the way through a national championship game loss to North Carolina.

“It’s hard when you’re on a team with this many talented people, and there’s such a small difference between a lot of them,” senior defender Bethany Bogart said. “Staci was so good about being positive, working hard and doing what was best for the team.”

She provided a spark off the bench, but hers wasn’t one of the names mentioned by opposing coaches after UCLA victories. She also wasn’t mentioned when the All-Pac-10 teams were named.

But that was OK with Duncan. She hadn’t ever been a part of something as big as the 2000 Bruins.

“We were having such a successful season. It was great just to be a part of it,” Duncan said. “Last year I didn’t care where I was playing. We were going to the Final Four, and I was excited.”

Come the offseason, Duncan had seen the Final Four. Now she was ready to be one of the integral players to bring UCLA there again. Realizing that she could no longer rely on her immense talent alone, Duncan trained the entire summer to give herself a crack at the starting job she once owned.

“I didn’t know if I was even going to play my senior year, and then I thought, it’s all in my hands,” she said. “I figured there was nothing I could control except how hard I worked and how fit I came in, and so everything that was in my control I took care of.”

But Duncan once again found herself coming off the bench. Then in a difficult twist of fate, sophomore Lindsay Greco, one of the freshman standouts that came in during Duncan’s junior year, tore her ACL in practice and was lost for the season.

Duncan frowns each time she talks about Greco’s injury, but her sorrow for the loss of her teammate hides her determination to contribute after the team’s loss.

“It was an awful, awful thing and such a loss for our team,” Duncan said. “Jill said, ‘You’re doing great and you’re working hard.’ I felt like I was up to it.”

“Up to it” has come to be something of an understatement. Duncan entered the lineup Sept. 21 against the University of San Diego and has remained there ever since. Her goal in the 74th minute of the Bruins’ 1-0 victory over Stanford gave UCLA its first unshared Pac-10 title since 1997, and she’s third on the team in scoring.

It’s not quite the kind of “to hell and back” story that belongs on “Behind the Music,” but when Duncan talks about the pressures of playing this season as a favorite (the Bruins debuted at No. 2 in the polls), one can’t help but draw a parallel to her own personal experience over the last two years.

“It’s so hard to stay on top,” she said. “It gets harder but it gets better – harder to stay up there but better to win.”