Week 2 schedule highlights

Friday’s best
1. Stanford at North Carolina
2. Virginia at Penn State
3. Santa Clara at California
4. UCLA at Wisconsin
5. Virginia Tech at Texas A&M
6. Duke vs. Missouri (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
7. Maryland at Tennessee
8. New Mexico vs. Wisconsin-Milwaukee (at Marquette)
9. Hofstra at Boston College
10. Dayton at Colorado College

Best of the rest
Miami at Purdue
Wake Forest at East Carolina
William & Mary vs. Connecticut (State College, Pa.)
Ohio State at Pitt
St. John’s at James Madison
Louisville at South Carolina
Auburn at Marquette
Washington at Massachusetts
Baylor at Arizona State
Oklahoma State at Oregon
USC at TCU
Arizona at San Diego
Utah at Georgia
Indiana at Kentucky
Minnesota at Vanderbilt
Michigan vs. Pepperdine (San Diego)
Denver at Loyola Marymount
SMU at Portland

Saturday special
LSU at Memphis

Sunday’s best
1. Duke vs. Stanford (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
2. USC at Texas
3. Oklahoma State at Portland
4. Missouri at North Carolina
5. West Virginia at Ohio State
6. Virginia vs. Connecticut (State College, Pa.)
7. San Diego State at Florida
8. William & Mary at Penn State
9. Kansas at Georgia
10. New Mexico at Marquette

Best of the restt
Charlotte at NC State
Villanova at James Madison
UCLA vs. Northwestern (Madison, Wisc.)
SMU at Oregon
Arizona vs. Pepperdine (San Diego)
Washington at Boston University
Auburn at UW-Milwaukee
Loyola Marymount at Nebraska

They said it …

Browsing for what coaches and players had to say from team site video.

Texas coach Chris Petrucelli on Leah Fortune
“Leah was gone all year; we hadn’t seen her much. We just got her back this week, and we’re happy to have her back. She created the first one with her throw-in and got the game-winner and was dangerous the whole game.” — Link

Texas defeated NC State 2-1, with Fortune scoring the second goal and setting up the first with a flip throw. The redshirt freshman sat out last season but competed over the summer for Brazil in the Under-20 World Cup.

Penn State coach Erica Walsh on her back line at West Virginia
“I thought Christine [Nairn] played an integral part tonight in switching the point of attack. It was a good field and she did a nice job of finding our outside backs. Emma [Thomson] did well to get into the attack, and [Megan Monroig] did as well. I’m especially proud of that back line. I thought they came together well with Krissy Tribbett and did a nice job keeping some shots away from our goal. ” — Link

Keeper Tribbett has as tough a job as any player in the game this season, stepping in for Alyssa Naeher, who has herself wasted little time emerging as a starter for Boston in WPS. Tribbett missed last season for the Nittany Lions and the redshirt sophomore had three career starts prior to the game in Morgantown, W.V. With Thomson, Monroig, Lexi Marton and Carly Niness in front of her, only one of West Virginia’s 10 shots required a save.

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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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