Turning up the heat in the second half, the Bruins overcame a lackluster start against the Boilermakers on Sunday.

“First half was very, very, very boring,” said coach Margueritte Aozasa. “I told the team at halftime, ‘Nobody pays to watch you play like that.’ It was just not fun to watch, zero energy, not a lot of creativity. And because there was no energy, we had a lot of breakdowns.”

UCLA women’s soccer (8-2-1, 3-0 Big Ten) left West Lafayette, Indiana with a 2-0 win over Purdue (5-4-1, 1-2) in the teams’ first meeting, with both goals coming in quick succession in the second half off corner kicks. The Bruins reversed course at halftime, with 11 more shots in the second half compared to the first, eight of which were on goal.

In the 57th minute senior defender Quincy McMahon earned a corner kick and took it quickly, tapping the ball over to junior midfielder Sofia Cook on the corner of the box. Cook touched the ball past a Boilermaker, then took a long shot, sending the ball soaring into the far corner of the net.

“We know very well that we’re not great at serving the ball directly off a long service, or a header or something like that. So when we get set pieces, one of our goals is to be creative and find ways to get shots off and find ways to find ourselves in dangerous areas,” Aozasa said. “So I was really pleased with kind of that heads up play by our team to go short and go quick, and it caught them off guard.”

Three minutes later the ball popped out of the box following another corner and junior forward Bridgette Marin-Valencia stepped to the ball and buried a 30-yard shot to the top left of the goalkeeper.

Marin-Valencia – whose goal marked a team-leading and personal best third goal of the year – said she has been practicing that type of shot all summer.

With their first multi-goal game since August 18, the Bruins put the Boilermakers on the back foot.

“We knew that we broke through, and then we wanted to keep going. So our energy, if it was at 100, our energy went to 125 right after,” Marin-Valencia said. “We just wanted to keep going, and we finally broke through.”

The Bruins had attacking opportunities in the first half, but only recorded two shots, trailing the Boilermakers’ three.

The Bruin defense was tested in the first half, with senior defender Lilly Reale cleanly breaking up a two-on-one and graduate student goalkeeper Ryan Campbell collapsing on a long ball slotted through the defense.

Aozasa said the energy picked up slightly when substitutions were made with about 10 minutes left in the first half – originally intended for earlier in the game but stalled because of a lack of game stoppages.

She added that the complete change came after halftime when she got the chance to speak to her players.

“We just talked about how Sunday games can be difficult, especially Sunday games on the road,” Aozasa said. “But there was no excuse for not performing how we know we can perform. We kind of said, ‘You can be tired, but you can’t act tired.'”

With a three weekend, six-game road trip behind it, UCLA will return home to take on Wisconsin on Sept. 26.

“We do a really good job of ending the game really well,” Cook said. “Each week we can just keep working on starting the game how we ended.”