Each week during the soccer season, we'll try to shine the spotlight on a player whose recent performances reinforce her place among the best in the nation. Consider it our way to check in on, or in some cases introduce, the personalities who will shape the race for espnW player of the year.
Maybe it's the dizzyingly unobstructed views of the Pacific Ocean beyond one sideline of Pepperdine's home field. Or maybe it's just that the host, an NCAA tournament regular in recent years, is one of college soccer's better organized teams. Whatever the case, while Malibu may be a welcoming destination for those wearing sandals, it is less kind to those in soccer cleats.
Host Pepperdine entered Sunday's game against USC with a home shutout streak nearly two years in the making, a span of more than 950 minutes in which visitors failed to score a goal.
USC's Savannah DeMelo needed fewer than 20 minutes to end the streak and barely more than 50 minutes to score a second goal. She spotted a seam and made a run through much of the defense to get on the end of a cross for the first goal, and she finished a penalty kick for the second.
No visiting team had scored more than three goals at Pepperdine since 2009, a span of 85 games.
DeMelo helped set up USC's third. Then her assist helped make it 4-0 inside of an hour.
Absent from USC's season opener a week earlier while part of the U.S. entry in the Under-20 World Cup, DeMelo marked her return to college soccer with a total of two goals and three assists in two wins.
Still, the performance in Malibu, in particular, seemed to carry with it a statement of intent. A statement for No. 7 USC, certainly, as it prepares this week to visit No. 4 Florida State (Friday, ACC Network Plus, 7 p.m. ET) and No. 22 Florida (Sunday, SEC Network+, 6 p.m. ET), and in the longer run, chase down No. 1 Stanford and No. 2 UCLA in the Pac-12 and the national polls.
But also a statement for a player. As suggested by her place on the youth national team, and all-Pac-12 first-team honors a season ago, the redshirt sophomore isn't short on accolades or appreciation.
That still might sell short a player who has been oh-so-close to doing things on an even grander scale.
She was nearly the rare player to not only appear in two U-20 World Cups, the biennial event that is the premier youth stage in women's soccer, but start regularly in both tournaments. After excelling in qualifying for the 2016 U-20 World Cup as a 17-year-old, she tweaked her knee before the main event in Papa New Guinea and played a limited role in a fourth-place finish.
She was nearly part of an NCAA champion as a freshman in 2016. But in order to compete in the U-20 World Cup, she deferred enrollment in college for a semester. USC won its second national championship one day after she came on as a substitute for the U.S. in the third-place game against Japan in the World Cup on the other side of the world.
She was nearly the midfield dynamo for a World Cup contender. The U.S. exited this year's U-20 event in the group stage for the first time ever, but that doesn't tell the whole story. The teams that edged it out in Group C, Japan and Spain, met again for the title. All that separated DeMelo and the Americans from those two was a long-distance strike from Japan in a 1-0 opening win.
She earned the chance to get close. Events largely out of her control interceded.
"I don't see it as like I'm missing out on things," DeMelo said. "I see it more as I've been blessed to have many opportunities to succeed in soccer. It's just a blessing and a curse to choose which one I want, if that makes sense. So going to the U-20s that first year is what really made me grow as a player. I had that knee injury and I didn't get to play as much as I wanted, but it taught me a lot about what a team is and mentally being strong. ... It's something I wouldn't change for the world."
"You never know what's going to happen, so play your heart out every chance you get." Savannah DeMelo
So go back to her first goal of the season, the first goal against Pepperdine in all those minutes. Normally somewhere in the center of the field in the No. 10 role, DeMelo had temporarily switched to a wide role along that sideline overlooking the Pacific Ocean as the ball made its way into the far corner. She had the soccer IQ to see the available run from at least 40 yards away as Tara McKeown, a teammate with both USC and the U-20 team, drove toward the end line with only a chance at getting off a cross. When that cross did come, DeMelo had the agility to slide between defenders and the skill to get her foot to the ball and direct it into the goal.
But she also had the desire to make the run at all. That, too, is part of the checklist to be like Lionel Messi or Andres Iniesta, the midfielders she most enjoys watching.
"It's having trust in my teammates that if they do what they're supposed to do, I'm going to be there to do what I'm supposed to do," DeMelo said. "In a moment like Tara going down the line, I know I've got to put in a little more energy to get to where I'm supposed to be to put that chance away. If I make that hard run -- the game was very frantic at the beginning, and I think that goal, putting that goal away, helped us relax and take a deep breath."
It is a moment of urgency perhaps best understood not by those who have never failed but by those who, for whatever reason, saw the opportunity to succeed slip away.
"You never know when that moment could be gone," DeMelo said. "I think us in the World Cup this past cycle, I think our first game we kind of took for granted that we're at the World Cup and stuff. Because I don't think we played to our full potential. By the [next game against Paraguay] we were 100 percent playing like how we know we wanted to be, but you can't take any games off. Especially in the group we had, taking that Japan game lightly hurt us at the end. I just think of it like you never know what's going to happen, so play your heart out every chance you get."
For all she's already accomplished, DeMelo's moment is still to come. Bet on her being ready.