Without a football team to cheer on (thank you, John Silber), it goes without saying that there isn’t too much going on sports-wise at BU in the fall.
Terrier fans can use August, September and early October to focus on their favorite professional teams or college teams from back home, all while counting down the days until the first puck drops at Agganis Arena.’
However, for devout advocates and supporters of BU athletics, there has always been a silver lining to these long, strenuous first couple of months: Terrier men’s and women’s soccer.
Both programs have achieved a great deal of success over the past decade led by long-tenured head coaches, and though the sport still struggles to gain notoriety in the U.S., both teams benefit from being the main draw on campus for the first part of the school year.
This year has been something of an interesting case study for both teams, as the striking similarities that seemed to tie these teams together going into the season have all but disintegrated in a mere matter of a few weeks.
The teams have embarked on divergent paths.
For the sake of ridicule and utter disappointment (not the traditional sexist reasons), I’ll begin this discussion with the Terrier men, a team that entered the season with extremely high expectations.
Before the year hardly even got under way, the BU men were dealt a bad hand with the loss of star striker Shaun Taylor for the season due to a leg injury sustained in training. But any hope that appeared lost from Taylor’s injury was soon regained with a series of wins, including a hard-earned three points on the road against a top-15 UConn team, proving the point that this team may be on the lucky end of the Ewing Theory (Google Bill Simmons) in Taylor’s absence.
The coup d’etat of the opening slate of the season was a highly-anticipated matchup against St. John’s, the top-ranked team in the nation at the time. It was a game that featured a buzz and excitement at Nickerson, an electric atmosphere I’d never seen around the soccer program before (this is only my second year here, though, so take that for what it’s worth).
The team was buoyed by fantastic performances from several key players en route to a benchmark 1-0 win over the Red Storm, putting the college soccer world on notice that this could very well be a special year for Terrier soccer.
In the aftermath of that upset, I wrote that there were two different directions that the BU men could head in for the remainder of the season.
The first possibility was that they could use that win over St. John’s to propel them to further non-conference success and then use that momentum to breeze through conference play.
The second and far less appealing option was that the team would regress in wake of the monumental win, never really able to fully recover and regain focus after such an emotional high ‘-‘- living in the past, in a sense.
Whether or not the St. John’s win has lingered too strong, the unfortunate reality is that the Terrier men’s soccer team has taken the latter of the two routes. Beginning with a tough loss to Boston College at home, the team hasn’t necessarily spiraled out of control but has been surprisingly, well, bad.
The America East slate of games, something that BU has traditionally dominated, and what many people thought would be a cakewalk, has proven to be anything but, as the team has struggled to a sub-.500 record marred by befuddling losses to the likes of Binghamton and UMBC.
This year’s edition of BU men’s soccer has been about as reliable as Brad Lidge of late, and there’s really no way to sugarcoat it at this point ‘-‘- they’ve been flat-out terrible.
Despite all of these shortcomings, the season is not completely lost as the Terriers still found a way to sneak into the America East Tournament. Maybe this is just wishful thinking, but there is still a way that the team can regain its form and play to its true potential to win the tournament with a roster that is by far the most talented in the conference. Anything less would surpass extreme disappointment and border along the lines of a disaster, a far cry from the high early-season praises of two months ago.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is the women’s team, a group of players that has been unfairly over-shadowed in the court of public opinion, and evidently in this column, by the men’s pitfalls.
After all, the women got off to a similarly impressive start, winning some big games and even earning a tie on the road against then-No. 7 West Virginia. Sure, there were a few losses here and there, but the team proved in its non-conference schedule that it would be a force this year.
Unlike the men, the success did not end there. The BU women have stormed through conference play with little to no trouble whatsoever, with a road loss to Stony Brook being the only blemish on their record. They’ve won the games that they were supposed to win. Sometimes in sports, that can be one of the hardest things to do ‘-‘- staying focused and prepared enough over the long grind of a season to beat the teams that you’re expected to beat.
Jessica Luscinski and Emily Pallotta have both been absolute forces up top, Taleen Dimirdjian has been the reliable and productive epitome of a star midfielder and Janie Reilly is poised to become one of the best goalies in the history of the program.
The team just avenged an early loss to Stony Brook in the first game of the conference tournament, which if followed by a few more victories, would achieve for the BU women something their male counterparts don’t seem to be in the same position to achieve-a spot in the NCAA Tournament-truly justifying the hopes and expectations that followed them into this season.
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