USC soccer coach Ali Khosroshahin called it "an NCAA tournament atmosphere game."

A near-capacity crowd at Waipio Peninsula Soccer Stadium was on hand for a spring exhibition between Hawaii and USC on Thursday night. The fans went home happy with a 1-0 Rainbow Wahine victory.

UH timed the rare event to coincide with a massive AYSO youth soccer tournament in the neighboring fields. Kids swarmed the field to greet Wahine players and coach Michele Nagamine after the match. It was the first Wahine soccer spring game in several years at the 4,500-seat WPSS; the NCAA regular season is played in the fall.

Junior forward Tiana Fujimoto took a pass from Skye Shimabukuro and blew past Trojans goalkeeper Caroline Stanley in the 49th minute for the winning score.

UH returns 17 players from the 8-9-3 (3-5-1 Big West) team from 2012. Eight signed recruits for next season, including four local players, will not join the team until the fall.

"The spring season is such a good time for us to focus on the things that we never really get to address in the fall," Nagamine said. "We do a lot of individual tactics. We have a lot more individual attention we can pay to the kids.

"This kind of environment, getting all these fans out here … (for) a Thursday night spring game, we couldn’t ask for anything more."

Khosroshahin said, "The Rainbows here took it to us today," but he was pleased with the game setting and opportunity to take a team-bonding trip.

"To come out here and play in front of as many fans as you had here this evening, this doesn’t happen for us in the spring very often," he said. "Maybe a couple hundred people at best. … It’s great preparation for next year."

USC, which was 6-10-3 and 3-6-2 in the Pac-12 Conference last year, won the national championship in 2007. UH combatted its size disadvantage with feistiness and physical play.

For Shimabukuro, it was a fine opportunity to get back to playing shape coming off a knee injury and medical redshirt year.

"It’s been a frustrating road, but it feels so good to come back and pick it back up with my team like this," she said. "The team and the coaches helped me the whole way through."

As a preview of the post-Kanani Taaca era in goal, freshman goalkeepers Georgia Barnes and Erica Young split the duties by half. Young had an outstanding airborne save to preserve the lead midway through the second half. The two combined for three saves.

Notes

‘Iolani graduates Amanda McCaskill and Erika Nana have left the program, Nagamine said, for personal reasons and to focus on the UH engineering program, respectively. McCaskill tore an ACL in her first career game and redshirted in 2012. Nana was a reserve the past three years and would have been a senior in the fall. Nagamine said she hopes McCaskill will return eventually.