In a final flourish, senior midfielder Teresa Noyola walked off in January with college soccer's biggest individual award, the Hermann Trophy, capping off Stanford's national championship season. The only nagging detail was that she beat her teammate, runner-up Lindsay Taylor, to win.
Noyola and Taylor, a senior forward and the Pac-12 player of the year, were the scoring leaders for a squad that went 25-0-1. The team won the NCAA title by defeating Duke 1-0 on a Noyola goal.
"We were going to be happy for each other either way," notes Noyola, who became only the second female competitor to win the Hermann as well as the scholar-athlete of the year award from the National Soccer Coaches Association of America. It's the first time in the 24-year history of the women's selections that a school has produced different winners for three straight years. The winner two years ago was Kelley O'Hara, '10, followed in 2010 by Christen Press, '11.
