With the start of the women’s college soccer season just five days away, what better time to ponder five questions for the upcoming season? Like an advent calendar with lots and lots of words in place of gifts, we’ll take it one question per day.
No. 5: Is North Carolina really still the team to beat?
If a program not already in possession of 20 NCAA championships lost full-time starters the caliber of Whitney Engen, Kristi Eveland, Ashlyn Harris, Tobin Heath, Jessica McDonald and Casey Nogueira — not to mention Nikki Washington, lost to injury after eight starts last season, and Lucy Bronze, who also started eight games — is there any chance that program would open the following season ranked No. 1? To be polite, it’s unlikely. That’s essentially half a WPS starting lineup that is now, well, starting on at least an occasional basis in WPS (as of Aug. 13, they had combined for 39 WPS starts this season).
So it must be time to rebuild in Chapel Hill.
Only, if you looked at a 2010-11 roster for “Generic State University” that featured Courtney Jones and Brittani Bartok up top, Meghan Klingenberg, Ali Hawkins and Amber Brooks in the midfield and Rachel Givan anchoring the back line, could you really dismiss it as a championship contender? And what about when you throw in a recruiting class that includes the likes of United Stated U-20 internationals Crystal Dunn and Meg Morris, as well as Kealia Ohai, the NSCAA High School Player of the Year?
And in a nutshell, that’s why North Carolina is North Carolina.
I don’t think North Carolina enters the season as the most likely team to win the title, nor would I have voted them No. 1 based on their status as defending champions (a status for which any value, it seems to me, is directly proportional to how much of the championship team is still around). But if North Carolina isn’t college soccer’s Chelsea this season, it’s considerably closer to being Manchester City or Arsenal than it is to falling back to Bolton or Wigan status.
The greatnest source of Tar Heel-ish goodness this season is to be found along an imaginary line dividing the field lengthwise. In Dunn at center back, Brooks at holding midfielder, Hawkins at attacking midfielder and Jones in the middle of Anson Dorrance’s preferred three-forward front, North Carolina can still apply an abundance of pressure right up the gut at all points on the field. (And as an aside, it’s going to be far too tempting to write bad Brooks and Dunn leads for the next three seasons).
Brooks and Hawkins are proven commodities in their roles, particularly Hawkins, who Dorrance once compared to John Terry (back when that was still a good thing) for her leadership skills. Watch the Tar Heels live and keep an eye on Hawkins at halftime. She doesn’t jog off with the rest of the players; she confers with Dorrance or Bill Palladino on the way to the locker room, a coach in training if there ever was one. And based on how Dunn performed during the Under-20 World Cup, it’s entirely fair to award the freshman that kind of confidence from the get-go. That leaves Jones as a key figure in the group.
Lost to some degree amidst all the talent and the eventual championship last season was that North Carolina’s goal production fell rather dramatically from the 2008 championship run (especially when you consider last year’s team started off scoring in almost historic fashion, putting up 13 goals against UCLA and Notre Dame early in the campaign). The overall decline included Jones’ production dropping from 13 goals as a freshman to six as a sophomore (though her assists increased from three to seven). Whether or not she emerges as a pure finisher on par with the likes of Portland’s Danielle Foxhoven or UCLA’s Sydney Leroux is yet to be determined — 19 goals in two seasons isn’t a bad start — but she has the speed and power to score 15 this season on raw talent alone.
Throw in a left side that could include Klingenberg and Ohai, and, well, North Carolina is North Carolina.
The easy comparison for this team is the 2006 Tar Heels team that welcomed a talented and large freshman class, merged it with Heather O’Reilly and a handful of key veterans and won a national title (after losing the season opener at Texas A&M, where, you guessed it, the Tar Heels open this season). This team probably has slightly more returning depth but lacks an individual presence quite like O’Reilly. Then again, that North Carolina team didn’t hit No. 1 until Oct. 24, the eighth poll of the 2006 season and didn’t have the No. 2 team in the nation on its schedule in the second week of the season, as this year’s team does against Stanford on Aug. 27.
So is North Carolina the team to beat? That’s a tough case to make out of the gates. Are the Tar Heels you wouldn’t want to have to beat in November or December? As usual, it will be a surprise if that’s anything but the case.
Graham Hays 