The Peak

Clan get their revenge on defending champs

By Matt Lee, Associate Staff Contributor

The SFU men’s soccer team had some pretty unfortunate luck when it came to their regular season schedule. They opened their season August 20 in Langley. Since then, they’ve travelled to Oregon, Washington State and back to Oregon. The team altogether has played eight games — all on the road.

The team won’t get to play on their home field until September 27 against Seattle University, and altogether have only three games at Terry Fox Field. It appears the road back to the NAIA final four won’t come easy for the Clan, because the road is seemingly endless.

But despite two losses in its first three games to start the season, a sub-par start for a team that comes off a 17-2-1 mark, SFU has rallied to string a three-game winning streak together, including a huge 1-0 victory over Asuza Pacific, the team which ousted SFU in last year’s NAIA National Championship and won it all.

“It was huge [to beat Asuza],” Koch said. “Every time you play a team ranked that high and [that has] won the national championship . . . to go out and beat them gives us all sorts of confidence. If we can beat a team like that, we can beat any team.”

The win against Asuza Pacific has SFU riding the momentum rollercoaster at the highest point and offsets the slow start they had early in the year. Koch noted that the first few weeks of the season were tough because of the fact that many of the players needed to adapt to new styles of play and also to develop team chemistry.

“That’s been the biggest difference between the first week of the season and now . . . The team used to play a standard 4-4-2 formation but we mix it up now so our players have to be aware of different systems of play.”

As the Clan hit the halfway mark of the season, it’s fair to say they’ve been a rollercoaster ride from the start. In their first contest since being eliminated in the national championships last year, the Clan were thumped at the hands of Trinity Western by a 5-1 score and seemed slow out of the gate.

“We brought in a lot of new players and it takes time for a group like that to gel,” head coach Alan Koch explained. “We’ve figured out we need to work extra hard this season to win, because every team that plays against us wants to beat us. We have to be extra prepared to win every game.”

Koch believes that while the team took the NAIA by surprise by making it to the final four last year, they also put a target on themselves for opponents. Labelled as a top team, opponents feel the need to bring more than 100 per cent to the field when they play an SFU team that lost in the national semifinals a year ago.

The journey back will continue to be the goal SFU strives for, but the team understands it’s going to need to continue its current work pace, and are hoping the second half will pave the way towards qualifying for the nationals.

“It’s hard to pinpoint individual players, the way the team’s been playing,” Koch said. “It’s taken a huge effort. Every individual has stepped up their play recently and we’re going to need everyone to continue [to do that] in order to be successful,” he added.

The men took another trip down south, this time to Montana, with intentions of building on that three-game winning streak during their two-game weekend series. Check out athletics.sfu.ca for scores and game recaps.