Underseeded UVA women’s soccer team dives into NCAA Tournament

By Kip Coons

For the first time in 19 months, Virginia will play in the NCAA Women’s Soccer Championship, and for some time Cavaliers coach Steve Swanson wondered whether that would come to pass.

A year of COVID protocols will cause some uncertainty.

“We do feel fortunate and grateful to have played in the fall and the spring, and grateful that we’re heading to our tournament, that it’s actually going to take place,” Swanson said Monday over a Zoom press conference.

“When you look at that, I would say it’s an amazing accomplishment that we got through the fall, but I think it’s an amazing accomplishment for our players that we’ve made it through both the fall and the spring, that we’re going to the NCAA tournament.”

The Cavaliers (10-4-2), one of five ACC sides in the reduced 48-team field, will be traveling to a familiar locale, WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary, N.C. UVa, an at-large selection, will play Southern Illinois-Edwardsville (8-2-2), the champions of the Ohio Valley Conference, at 7 p.m. Wednesday on Field #2 at WakeMed.

A victory over SIUE would send the Cavaliers to a second-round contest at 7 p.m. Saturday on Field #2 against 12th-seeded Brigham Young (10-3-1), which received a first-round bye.

Swanson said SIUE would be a good test.

“I think they’re well-coached,” he said. “They’ve got a real fighting mentality. I think they’re physical. They’ve got some players who can cause problems going forward and scoring goals. They’re very competitive and organized on the defensive side.”

The other ACC teams in the field are No. 1-seeded Florida State (11-0-0), No. 2 seed North Carolina (15-1-0), No. 9 Duke (10-5-3), and No. 14  Clemson (12-4-0). They earned first-round byes as seeded teams.

Eight first-round games were scheduled for Tuesday and eight more for Wednesday at seven sites around North Carolina, with the tournament culminating in the College Cup at WakeMed on May 13 and 17.

The NCAA moved the entire women’s tournament as well as the concurrent men’s tournament to the Tar Heel State to cut down on travel between games and make it easier for teams to adhere to COVID protocols in the  same way that the NCAA basketball tournaments were staged entirely in the Indianapolis (men) and San Antonio (women) regions in March.

WakeMed is certainly a familiar venue for ACC teams. The ACC tournament is usually played there, as it was last fall when Florida State won it, and Virginia  made a College Cup appearance there as well in 2013.

“Most of our players have played at least once down there,” Swanson said. “We’re familiar with it; it’s not too far for us. I think those things are positives. But at the end of the day, you still have to have good performances.”

Because of the cancellations of three matches with Old Dominion and James Madison, UVa played only four matches in the spring as part of the bifurcated 2020-21 season. The NCAA opted back in September to hold its fall sports championships other than football in the spring.

As a result, the Cavaliers have played only two matches in the past month, both against West Virginia (10-2-1), which has earned the fifth seed and could be a third-round matchup with UVa. The Mountaineers posted a 1-0 win at home over UVa on April 3 and tied 1-1 at Charlottesville on April 10.

“The challenge for us is obviously we had the bulk of our games in the fall, and we were getting the repetition of playing games on a more consistent basis,” Swanson said. “We have not had that this spring.

“It’s been harder to get a sense of a rhythm and timing with that. I think  these last two games against West Virginia … there was obviously something riding on those. They both had a real tournament feel to them, I think from a physical side and a competitive side, so to have those two games I think was very beneficial for us.”

UVa will have gone 18 days since playing a live match, so the challenge for Swanson and his staff has been to go hard enough in practice to keep an edge without risking injury to his players.

“We always look at our practices and say, how has our training been?” he said. “Our training to me has always reflected our performances by how well we train. I think our players should feel confident because I think the last couple weeks have been really good. We’ve had really good training sessions. The focus has been there, and the quality has been there.”

The Cavaliers are probably as healthy as they have been all year. Swanson won’t have the services of senior midfielders in Anna Sumpter and Sydney Zandi, who were lost to ACL injuries. But senior midfielder Taryn Torres, who played sparingly last fall, has returned to health and looked sharp against WVU.

The biggest return to form, however, has been senior goalkeeper Laurel Ivory, who missed the 2019 NCAA tournament after suffering a broken jaw during the ACC tournament that year.

“That was obviously a blow to us in the last tournament,” Swanson said. “We lost her at a very tough time. She’s a big part of our team, a vocal leader for us and one of the best keepers in the country. She’s been playing very well, (and) she’s worked very hard, especially this year.”

Ivory is part of a veteran cast for UVa, which will look to sophomore center forward Diana Ordonez (9 goals, 4 assists, 22 points), junior forward-midfielder Alexa Spaanstra (6-2-14), and freshman midfielder Lia Godfrey (4-7-15) for its scoring. Spaanstra was a first-team All-ACC selection, while Ordonez and Godfrey were second-team picks. Godfrey was also the ACC Freshman of the Year.

If there was a surprise in the tournament field, it was the relative underseeding of several teams, including UVa, which was ranked 12th in the final coaches poll but did not earn a top-16 seed.

On the selection show, chairman Clifton Douglass, the assistant commissioner of Conference USA, said because the tournament was being held entirely in North Carolina the committee didn’t have to factor geographical difficulties in forming a bracket, allowing for a ranking of teams Nos. 1-48. By that account, UVa extrapolates to No. 21 in the bracket, well below its poll ranking. Then again, fourth-ranked Penn State didn’t get a seed either.

“I don’t envy the committee,” Swanson said diplomatically. “I think it was a tough go. It’s always hard to look at teams, and in a COVID year, and understand exactly the circumstances.”

He added, “The way I look at it is, yeah, we did things and maybe we should have been a top-16 seed, but you have to make that very apparent to the committee. And apparently we didn’t do that. We can only look at ourselves. I like to put the onus and responsibility on our team and ourselves because we didn’t do enough things against top quality. If you look at our ranked opponents, our quality opponents, we didn’t get enough results against them.

“That’s on us. We have to take responsibility for that. I try to look at these things with an open mind. I never believe a ref makes a difference between whether you win or lose, and I don’t think a committee makes a difference. … I just look at it (as) we made the tournament, we’re in the tournament, this is what we’ve been dealt with, and you control the things you can control

“We’ve gotten better throughout the spring, and hopefully now we can play our best here at the end.”