As the N.C. State men’s soccer team rang in the new year, head coach Kelly Findley’s message to his players and coaching staff was heard loud and clear.
“One of our goals this year is to make it to the College Cup,” Findley said. “There is no more, ‘I hope we get into the NCAA Tournament.’ The bottom line is that our goal needs to be something we own and we believe we can do instead of just something we’re hoping for.”
The College Cup is NCAA soccer’s equivalent of the Final Four. The Wolfpack has only made the College Cup once in program history, a semifinal appearance in 1990, and failed to make the NCAA Tournament last season.
On the surface, Findley’s declaration may seem an impossible task. But most of State’s starters from last season’s team, which barely missed post-season play, will be returning to play for the Wolfpack in 2014.
“We had young guys like [sophomore midfielder] Michael Bajza, [junior midfielder] Holden Fender and [sophomore midfielder] Travis Wannemuehler who did well this year and played significant minutes,” Findley said. “But we’re also going to have a really strong senior group. Guys like [senior defenders] Matt Ingram, Moss Jackson-Atogi, Ryan Metts, Clement Simonin and [senior forward] Nick Surkamp are all guys who are going to be able to help carry this team.”
The Wolfpack also has a group of highly-touted newcomers to carry the load in the fall. Freshmen midfielders Zach Knudson and Nicolas Retzlaff, along with freshman forward Ade Taiwo, are all listed as four-star recruits by topdrawersoccer.com.
Sophomore midfielder Reed Norton, a transfer student from Georgia Southern University, will also give State’s attack another deadly dimension. All four players are eligible to participate in spring activities with the team after enrolling in spring semester classes at the university.
“We play around seven or eight games in the spring that these new guys can play in also,” Findley said. “They can get great experience, and we can actually start incorporating them into our team tactics, philosophy and those things.”
Findley’s 2014 recruiting class doesn’t end there, however. Goalkeeper Marius Heislitz, along with defenders Conor Donovan, Caleb Duvernay and Matias Fracchia have committed to N.C. State as well and will join the Wolfpack in time for the 2014 regular season. Heislitz, Donovan, Duvernay and Fracchia are all listed as four-star recruits.
“This group of players we have coming in is probably going to be the best group that’s been recruited at N.C. State since the late 1980s,” Findley said.
The Wolfpack’s current group of core players, including senior defender Ryan Metts, had its first team meeting of 2014 on Tuesday afternoon. Metts, State’s captain for the 2014 season, said the meeting had one clear theme throughout.
“We talked about how we need to start believing in ourselves,” Metts said. “We know now, after last season, that we can beat Carolina and compete with the best soccer programs in the country. We were up one goal on three of the four teams that were national semifinalists this year, and those are games that we could have won easily but didn’t.”
“After last season we’re all hungry for more. We all believe that we can win games, but now it’s a matter of doing it.”
Some of the Wolfpack’s key attacking players will be graduating, including midfieldersNazmi Albadawi and Alex Martinez. But senior forward Nick Surkamp says the coaching staff has established a system that helps the program handle the loss in personnel without a drop in results.
“Coach [Findley] has a very structured philosophy where he likes us to do specific things and play a certain way,” Surkamp said. “But with some of the players we had before, they had a lot of freedom to do lots of things. Creative players need to be given lots of freedom to produce.”
“But going forward, in a structured system like the one coach [Findley] has implemented, our roles are more defined than they were before. A lot of the players we have now will fit into our system a little bit differently than they did before.”
