Month: August 2010

New Mexico returns and other weekend thoughts

I. There is life after talking heads for New Mexico
It won’t fill time for any of the sports-blather radio shows. Pundits won’t work themselves into a lather, or snidely serve up coded language while debating what it means on television. Heck, as far as I know, it will even go ignored on the website I work for. But New Mexico had a heck of a weekend of women’s soccer.

Playing without Elizabeth Lambert, who now seems to be listed as Liz for reasons that you can probably figure out for yourself with a Google search, New Mexico rolled over Montana by a 7-0 to open the season and then followed it with a surprisingly decisive 3-0 margin of victory against Nebraska. Lambert sat out the games as part of the suspension handed down for the much-publicized incident against BYU, but she will be eligible to play next week when New Mexico travels to Milwaukee for two suddenly intriguing games against UW-Milwaukee and Marquette.

Picked fifth in the Mountain West preseason poll, New Mexico scored just 29 goals in 21 games last season, and never more than eight in a two-game stretch. But with leading scorer Jennifer Williams, two goals on the weekend, among 10 returning starters, it’s a team worth keeping an eye on for strictly soccer reasons.

The Lobos even managed to add a marriage proposal to the weekend haul, offering a nice moment for a program that closed last season in controversy. A fourth-year student with junior eligibility who appeared in just one game last season, Kerrin Stephan accepted boyfriend Kris Bakhois’ on-field surprise on-field proposal (you can get the whole story from this video).

II. North Carolina is going to do what North Carolina does
Who was suggesting the Tar Heels perhaps weren’t the preseason No. 1? Ah, yes, I guess that was me. At least I had some company from other polls.

Two games way from Chapel Hill, six goals scored by six players and no goals conceded by a freshman goalkeeper and, with the exception of the first half of the first game, an entirely new back line. Who needs Casey Nogueira, Tobin Heath, Whitney Engen, Kristi Eveland, Nikki Washington, Jessica McDonald, Lucy Bronze and Ashlyn Harris, anyway?

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Surprise, surprise, USC is really young

But will the No. 19 Women of Troy may make coach Ali Khosroshahin an old man by season’s end? USC’s coach doesn’t lack for confidence, but watch the video of his take on a 1-0 loss at home against San Diego and it’s difficult to picture the championship celebration that took place just three years ago.

All right, that all sounds a little dire. It may well turn out that Khosroshahin has the foundation of another run at the College Cup in his highly touted freshman class; it’s just not quite time in the building process to move the furniture in yet.

USC started five freshmen in the opener — Shelby Church, Autumn Altamirano, Haley Boysen, Elizabeth Eddy and Allie Harrison. The result sounds like, well, what you would expect with five freshmen. That the Women of Troy managed just eight shots and two corner kicks in 90 minutes suggests the coach’s stated concerns about poor passing weren’t just a perfectionist’s pickiness.

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Christen Press is just fine without Babe Ruth

The year after the Yankees and Babe Ruth parted ways, Lou Gehrig had one of the least productive seasons of his career. That 1935 campaign was still a fantastic season by any other player’s standards — 30 home runs, 119 RBI and a 1.049 OPS — but it wasn’t up to his standards, particularly coming off one of the most productive season of his career the year before in 1934. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Yankees failed to win at least 90 games for the first time in five seasons.

The downturn didn’t last; Gehrig rebounded by winning AL MVP in 1936 and reeled off back-to-back monster seasons before the effects of the disease that now bears his name brought his playing career to an end by the close of the decade. But the first season sans Ruth was a challenge.

Fast forward seven decades and compare apples to apples, and we need only look at how Casey Nogueira, Whitney Engen, Tobin Heath and North Carolina fared the season after Heather O’Reilly graduated — the lull in the middle of three national championships for the former trio’s class — for another example of the same phenomenon. O’Reilly graduated, the Tar Heels, by their standards, stopped scoring and the season ended short of the College Cup.

It’s not easy to replace a legend, even for someone bound to earn their own place in the history of a sport.

As her senior season begins, Stanford’s Christen Press doesn’t have the luxury of an adjustment period. She gets one crack at replacing Kelley O’Hara as the face and pulse of the Cardinal before some WPS teams presumably happily scoops her up for the next decade.

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Previewing No. 2 Stanford at No. 7 Boston College

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.

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