We know a lot about both No. 2 Stanford and No. 7 Boston College, teams that return most of the starting lineups that took the field when the teams met in the quarterfinals of last year’s NCAA tournament.
Friday at the Newton Soccer Complex, one of the underrated places nationwide to watch a game, we start to learn what we don’t know.
Both the Cardinal and Eagles lost significant offensive presences to graduation and WPS — Stanford to the greater degree with Hermann Trophy winner Kelley O’Hara, but Boston College with Gina DiMartino. But as blasphemous as it seems to suggest replacing a Hermann winner isn’t automatically the most pressing issue confronting a team, offense seems unlikely to prove a millstone around either team’s neck.
If you have Christen Press, Lindsay Taylor, Teresa Noyola and others — or Kristie Mewis, Vicki DiMartino, Julia Bouchelle and others — goals are going to come at a rate that ought to keep two teams ranked in the top 20 nationally in scoring last season on similar ground.
On the other hand, Kelly Henderson, Alicia Jenkins and Ali Riley didn’t get quite the same amount of attention as their goal-scoring counterparts (although Riley certainly managed to carve out a niche in the soccer-watching consciousness in showing off the skills at outside back that are making her an immediate WPS standout). But replacing those three, Henderson for Boston College and Jenkins and Riley for Stanford, offers perhaps the greatest peril for both teams Friday.
Enter Hannah Cerrone, Courtney Verloo and Camille Levin.
More than likely, although both Boston College coach Alison Kulik and Stanford coach Paul Ratcliffe seemed to hedge their bets talking about it in the days leading up to the match, Cerrone will take Henderson’s spot as one of the central defenders for Boston College, while Verloo will take Jenkins’ place in the same role for Stanford and Levin will replace Riley at outside back.
For Cerrone, it’s a short shift over from outside back if it happens, but those few yards dictate an entirely new style for a player whose team-high nine assists last season were not solely the product of taking set pieces for the Eagles.
“I guess you do have to be a little more conservative,” Cerrone said after last weekend’s scrimmage at Connecticut where she played both centrally in a 4-3-3 and back out on the right in a 4-4-2. “Like last year, I had great cover and I felt like I could go anywhere, whereas this year, there’s only one person behind me, as opposed to three, behind me. So I need to be a little more conservative.”
She was just that for most of her minutes against the Huskies, but she still pushed forward into the attack more than a typical central defender on occasion, as Kulik suggested she’s been encouraged to do. And at least once, the space that created led more or less directly to a scoring chance that a championship-caliber offense (say, one with easy access to pancakes from Stacks in Menlo Park, Calif.) would convert. For Kulik, it’s a dilemma coaches all over the country face this time of year — do you take a known quantity at one position and risk weakening your lineup in two places for the potential payoff of shoring up a weakness. Cerrone is a great outside back; she could be a great center back. What do you do?
Where’s Monty Hall when you need him.
“It obviously puts her right in front of goal and she’s real quick and competitive and things don’t get by her, so that’s a benefit there centrally,” Kulik said. “What you give up a little bit is her ability to get into the attack. And I think one of her strengths is her ability to get into the attack from the outside. So we’re just balancing right now. Kelly Henderson is a big loss for us, so we’re trying to gill Hendo’s shoes, if you will, but not minimize anything from Hannah going into the attack.”
On the other end of the sideline, Verloo is the embodiment of another quandary — what do you with a player who could be great in a number of roles but hasn’t had an opportunity to settle into any of them yet. Verloo clearly has an abundance of talent as a forward, enough to earn her regular minutes off the bench (and in eight starts) for the Cardinal last season. And more than enough to convince UCLA coach Jill Ellis to take Verloo to the Under-20 Women’s World Cup as a forward. But with lots of options up top, two big holes to fill in the back and a versatile player who needs to be on the field somewhere, well, meet Stanford’s newest — if perhaps still part-time — central defender.
“She’s just an overall great player,” Ratcliffe said. “She could end up being a great outside back at the national team level, a great central defender and then also a great forward. So we might move her around tomorrow; we’ll see how the game’s going. We might move her up top at some point. It depends on the games with her. She’s been overall a great player and done really well back there.”
At one point during Thursday’s practice, Ratcliffe paused a drill to point out to Verloo where she could have played a long ball into space instead of a more meandering short pass. Perhaps a minute later, as the drill restarted and Verloo boomed a perfect long ball for Taylor to run onto, Ratcliffe cheered her on (although the difference in cadence between Ratcliffe cheering, cajoling and chastising is discernible only through carefully calibrated instruments).
Not long after, there was Verloo, engaging in a little Socratic method (this is the Stanford soccer team, after all) during the same drill to try and sort out who was responsible for calling what as the ball approached. Call it learning on the fly.
“She’s adusting pretty quickly,” said Alina Garciamendez, her partner in the middle of the back line. “I’m surprised how quickly she’s adjusted because she’s been there for like a week and she pretty much knows where to be, how to play. Courtney’s really strong, really fast and good in the air, she has good distribution.”
We know a lot about Boston College and Stanford, but we don’t know everything. They don’t know everything about themselves yet. As players like Cerrone and Verloo find their places Friday night, they — and we — will start to get some answers.
Graham Hays 