Preseason questions roll on …

No. 4 What teams might not be getting the love they deserve?
To win the title: Texas A&M
The College Cup is in Cary, N.C., so Murphy’s Law suggests this will be the year the Aggies, so familiar with hosting championships in College Station, make it to the season’s final weekend, right? Not that any of G. Guerrieri’s crew would be complaining about the hardship of checking bags in early December.

Perhaps the best program never to reach the College Cup (or at least the best of the last decade, having reached the quarterfinals in 2001, 2002, 2006 and 2008), Texas A&M has the talent to not only get there this season but win two games once on site in North Carolina. The Aggies return 11 players who were regular starters last season on a team that went 15-7-3 and advanced to the Sweet 16. They also add two impact players who won’t have to deal with any freshman learning curve in senior Amber Gnatzig, a familiar face who missed last season with an injury, and junior Merritt Mathias, who contributed to championships the last two seasons with North Carolina.

Put Rachel Shipley, Whitney Hooper, Bri Young, Alyssa Mautz, Gnatzig and Mathias up against any collection of attacking talent in the country, including all the usual College Cup suspects, and you have a fair fight. A starter in A&M’s preseason exhibition against Rice, Mathias need all of nine minutes (8:59, if you’re counting) to get on the scoresheet with a goal. This is a team with the potential to get back over the 70-goal mark that the Aggies regularly surpassed earlier in the millennium. And with three returning defensive starters and two senior keepers, the other end of the field is hardly a wasteland.
Continue reading “Preseason questions roll on …” →

Week 1 Schedule Highlights

Must-See Friday Games
No. 1 North Carolina at No. 8 Texas A&M
No. 2 Stanford at No. 7 Boston College
Minnesota at No. 4 Notre Dame
No. 6 Florida State at No. 21 Washington State
No. 9 Santa Clara at San Diego State
Miami at No. 11 Florida
No. 12 South Carolina at Boston University
No. 13 Penn State at No. 24 West Virginia
Loyola Marymount at No. 14 California
RV San Diego at No. 19 USC
Oklahoma at No. 22 Oklahoma State
Duke at RV Georgia
Milwaukee at RV Ohio State
St. John’s vs. RV Michigan State
Montana at New Mexico

Must-See Sunday Games
No. 1 North Carolina vs. Michigan State
No. 2 Stanford at Boston University
Milwaukee at No. 4 Notre Dame
St. John’s at No. 8 Texas A&M
No. 11 Florida at No. 25 Central Florida
No. 12 South Carolina at Northeastern
RV Marquette at RV Ohio State

Answer me these preseason questions three (five, sir)

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.
Continue reading “Answer me these preseason questions three (five, sir)” →

There’s no place like home (but there might be better places)

I had no interest in staying in Indiana for college. It wasn’t anything against the state, whose (pro) sports teams I still support and which I’m still quite fond of for reasons running the gamut from family to fresh corn on the cob, but I wasn’t a lifer to begin with in the Hoosier State and I knew I wasn’t going to live there long term. There were better college opportunities — and to a 17-year-old mind, more exciting places — than Bloomington, South Bend, Richmond or any of the other towns with liberal arts schools. (West Lafayette was out because, well, Brandon Phillips pretty much summed up how I feel about math and science).

All of which is a roundabout way of saying the notion of protecting recruiting turf has always seemed a little perplexing. Why should kids choosing college necessarily want to stay close to home? Then again, nobody from IU or Notre Dame was sending me letters and calling to tell me how much they wanted me to come be a part of the their history program.

Nevertheless, going local was big in college sports long before it caught on in foodies.

There are 12 states represented by more than one player on this year’s preseason Hermann Watch List (going by the hometown listed for each player), led by California with seven players. Only in the case of Massachusetts, with Boston College’s Kristie Mewis and Northeastern’s Devin Petta, did all of such a state’s products stay home for college. California also came close, losing only Ali Hawkins to North Carolina.
Continue reading “There’s no place like home (but there might be better places)” →

Leslie Osborne and the WNT

All White Kit recently tackled the topic (the only appropriate alliteration for the player in question) of Leslie Osborne’s present absence from and uncertain future with the U.S. national team under Pia Sundhage. After not covering the WNT for a couple of years, I didn’t feel qualified to offer much of an opinion when given the opportunity to put together a feature on Osborne recently (nor would that have been the best venue for one). But even to someone who only recently discovered All White Kit, it’s obvious Jenna has a good feel for Sundhage’s roster machinations.

To me, Osborne is the perfect kind of player for the national team, almost without restriction relative to system (almost, but not completely). To delve into the dangerous language of intangibles, she’s a world-class grinder. As in, she plays like someone who has to rely solely on effort for her soccer survival, but she does with enough natural skill and athleticism to survive on the field against world-class players. As someone put it well recently, she’s going to win the challenge and play a square ball. And then do it again. It’s not fancy; it’s just effective.

Regardless of the sport, you don’t win titles with rosters comprised entirely of those sort of players. You also don’t win titles without a few of them. Lest we forget, this is a player who scored 44 goals in four seasons at Santa Clara and had 17 assists in one season. But as she expressed during the interview process for the feature, she has completely embraced the role of holding midfielder and made it her own.

“I love it,” Osborne said. “Tony [DiCicco], I think, brought me here to play that position. He thought last year that’s what they needed. I love it — but with the national team, [Sundhage] doesn’t play with one holding midfielder. So for the national team, that’s something that doesn’t really fit in with her. But I love playing holding mid. I hope what people would say is I’m a pretty good holding midfielder in this country.”

It’s also worth noting that Osborne said she still has a good relationship with Sundhage, despite her absence from the WNT roster.

All of which is why one paragraph, in particular, in Jenna’s post really caught my eye. Continue reading “Leslie Osborne and the WNT” →