CMS Men's Soccer Enters 2019 Season Eyeing NCAA Bid
CLAREMONT, Calif. - The Claremont-Mudd-Scripps men's soccer team in many ways had a storybook season last year, starting out with eight straight shutout wins, improving from four wins to 15, and leading the entire nation with only four goals allowed. The ending to the story, though, has left the Stags eagerly anticipating the sequel.
CMS used late-season 1-0 wins over Redlands and Occidental to capture the SCIAC regular season title and earn the top seed in the conference tournament, but a 0-0 draw with Chapman in the semifinals resulted in a 5-4 defeat in penalty kicks. The Stags were nationally ranked for much of the season, and held out hope that their final 15-2-1 record, and their stingy 0.21 team goals against average, would be enough to earn at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament.
The invitation never came, though, and the Stags headed into the offseason with bitter disappointment, despite not conceding a goal for the final 670 minutes of the year.
"We all feel like we were snubbed out of something really special last year," said junior left back William Birchard, who was a third-team All-America selection by D3soccer.com after leading CMS with six goals and five assists as a defender (scoring two more goals than all 18 Stag opponents combined). "We don't want that to happen again, so we are all pushing extra, giving 110 percent in everything we do."
Birchard is part of a back four that returns in tact from the unit that ended last season with six straight shutouts, along with senior center back Adam Singer, junior center back Kevin Proudfoot, and sophomore right back Grant Donaldson. The quartet was rock solid, helping current sophomore goalie Jacob Mays lead the nation in goals against average in his first collegiate season, while tallying 15 shutouts.
Singer, an All-SCIAC selection last year after missing his sophomore season with an injury, concurs with Birchard that all the 2018 success leaves this year's squad wanting more. "Obviously we had a really, really good season last year," he said. "It was a lot better than we expected. We won the league, but it's not what we really wanted to accomplish, which was win the postseason tournament and make a deep run in the NCAA Tournament. So the guys are really coming back with a chip on their shoulder this year, realizing that we can't really take anything for granted."
The Stags are testing themselves in the non-conference season, in order to improve the strength of schedule which gave the NCAA committee a reason to leave them out of last year's tournament. CMS opens the year at Emory's tournament in Atlanta, facing Oglethorpe and the host Eagles, and then travels to Texas to face national power Trinity and Texas-Dallas. Both Emory and Trinity spent time in the national top 10 a year ago, with Trinity ending the regular season ranked No. 5.
"We're stoked, we really want to see what the competition is like at that high level of Division III soccer," said Birchard about the early-season schedule. "We really want to push ourselves to do the best we can, and we are excited to get out there."
Allowing only four goals in an entire season is very unlikely to happen again, even with almost everyone on the defensive half of the field returning. The schedule and the travel will provide new challenges, and avoiding an unlucky bounce or a defensive lapse for 90 minutes makes every shutout an impressive feat, never mind 15 in 18 games. But Singer says that earning lofty shutout statistics was never really a goal of last season's team, and it won't be again this year.
"Obviously we want to keep clean sheets," said Singer, "but clean sheets come as the result of all the hard work we put in. If we are organized and we're disciplined, then we'll get them, but its pretty unrealistic to expect to only give up four goals again. Our goal this year is to change our mindset a little bit and try to score first in every game. We already know our defense is solid, but if we can come out attacking and get on the board first, it'll help us settle into the game better."
The Stags may rely on their collective offensive skill in order to make that mindset work. They lacked a single dominant scorer last year, but 13 of the 14 different players who scored goals are back with the program this fall. Birchard led the Stags in goals with six, largely due to his ball-striking ability on set pieces, while sophomores William Barton (five goals) and Ethan Tyng (three goals) had immediate impacts as freshmen coming off the bench and have the potential to expand their roles this year.
CMS can also put plenty of speed up top with senior Cole Smith (three goals) and junior Daniel Rohde (two goals), while senior Justin Gadalla (seven goals in last two years), who had the game-winner at the double-overtime buzzer at Whittier last year, gives the Stags an experienced, dangerous finisher. Junior Nate Huntington led the midfield attack with two goals and three assists, while senior Luke Scanlan (one goal) will look to fill the defensive midfield role left by the lone graduated starter from last year's team, Aidan Johnson.
It is a much different feeling around the program than 12 months ago, when CMS was coming off a four-win season and hoping to turn things around enough to make the conference playoffs. By the end of September, the Stags were no longer striving to make the SCIAC Tournament, they wanted to keep playing deep into November. The story of 2018 ended with the team putting their heads down in disappointment while watching a video stream of the selection show, but with almost all of the main characters returning, this year's team embarks on chapter one of the sequel hoping it can keep the pen in its own hands to write this year's final chapter.
To view a video preview for the 2019 CMS men's soccer team, click the play button above or visit our YouTube Page