Seeds of Success
November 02, 2002 11:38 AM | General
November 3, 2002
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The seeds of success for the No. 7-ranked West Virginia University women’s soccer team were planted on the Mountaineer Soccer field last November when WVU lost a difficult 1-0 decision to Miami, Ohio, in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
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| Junior Lisa Stoia ranks third on the team in scoring with 21 points. |
West Virginia, nationally ranked at the time, was one of 16 first-round hosts and was the highest seed of the four teams in Morgantown that weekend.
The two-game regional was supposed to have paved the way for West Virginia to make its first advancement to NCAA regional play. Instead, the Mountaineers got an embarrassing lesson in humility. They learned that moments are fleeting -- that you must seize the day.
Junior midfielder Lisa Stoia will never forget the bitter disappointment of losing that game on her home field.
“I still have a sick feeling in my stomach,” she admitted. “I’ll never forget that night. Being close to all of the seniors last year and just remembering how well we did during the season only to have it end that night. It was a shock for us and a great disappointment.”
Stoia and her Mountaineer teammates made up their minds this year to turn that negative into a positive, and the success emanating from the disappointment of losing that game is still yet to be fully measured.
After losing the season opener at nationally ranked Auburn, West Virginia has reeled off and unprecedented unbeaten steak that now spans 16 matches. The only blemish was a 1-1 tie at Seton Hall.
Perhaps the defining victory so far this season was a 2-1 victory at nationally ranked Virginia. That win not only catapulted West Virginia, now 15-1-1, into the top 10 in the national ratings, but it also legitimized the program in the eyes of others around the country.
The magnitude of that victory was not lost on Stoia and the rest of her teammates.
“We gained a lot of confidence after that win,” she said.
After defeating Virginia, the Mountaineers reeled off five straight wins before the Seton Hall tie, including an important 2-1 victory at regionally ranked Rutgers on Sept. 29.
A week later, West Virginia managed to defeat Notre Dame, 3-0 for the first time in school history. It was a dramatic turnaround for a WVU program that just six years ago lost 11-0 to the Irish at Notre Dame. For those of you not familiar with soccer remember that the football equivalent of that score would be 77-0.
That just goes to show you how far West Virginia coach Nikki Izzo-Brown has taken this program.
Despite the rapid success, Stoia and her teammates are expecting much more.
“The regular season determines where you stand but postseason is the best against the best,” she said. “When you play against the best you’ve got to perform to your best. It’s a totally different mentality when you step on the field.”
Making postseason appearances was just one of the things Lisa Stoia was interested in when she decided to attend West Virginia University after considering offers from Connecticut, Clemson, Delaware, Boston College and Boston University at William Floyd High School in Shirley, N.Y.
She liked the fact that West Virginia had a young, aggressive coaching staff and felt that they were on the verge of developing a sleeping giant.
“There were a lot of reasons that I picked this school,” she says. “I knew they were building something here and I wanted to be a part of it.”
Stoia, considered one of the top prep players on Long Island, has lived up to her pre-collegiate billing.
In 2001, the 5-foot-6 midfielder scored four goals and produced 12 total points to earn first team all-Big East and Soccerbuzz all-region honors.
This year, she joins junior Chrissie Abbott and sophomore Laura Kane to give West Virginia one of the nation’s most potent attacks. All three have tallied more than 20 points this year and have helped West Virginia out-score its opposition 43-9 this season.
Abbott is the team’s offensive catalyst, ranking 12th in the country this week with 18 goals and 40 points while Stoia is third on the team with six goals, scoring two in one game against Jacksonville State earlier this year.
Even though the Mountaineers are averaging almost 2.5 goals per game and have more than a three-to-one shot-attempt ratio against their opponents, it is their defense that has set them apart.
West Virginia is ranked fifth in the country this week with a goals against average of 0.51 per game. West Virginia is working on a streak of six straight shutouts, owning 10 overall this season. Only twice have Mountaineer opponents managed more than one goal in a game (Auburn and Pitt).
Some of the credit for West Virginia’s great defense must go to its powerful offensive attack that forces teams to pack in their half of the field and defend the Mountaineers’ highly skilled offensive players.
Stoia says most of the credit should go to West Virginia’s hard-nosed back line and the solid goal keeping duo of Melissa Haire and Laura Finley.
Haire and Finley have been able to keep teams off the scoreboard while battling injuries. Kane has been dealing with a sprained ankle and wouldn’t have played in the Penn State game had it not been canceled.
Meanwhile, Stoia has also been hampered by a bruised knee suffered in a win against Providence, but believes the week off will help her and her teammates get ready for St. John’s in the first round of the Big East tournament Sunday.
“We’ve all been in the training room working hard to get ready,” she said.
The Red Storm enters Sunday’s match with a 9-5-4 overall record. St. John’s was a late entrant into the tournament after knocking off Virginia Tech, 2-1 in overtime on Oct. 25.
The last time West Virginia faced St. John’s last year, the Mountaineers came away with a 5-1 victory.
After what West Virginia went through last year losing a postseason match on its home field, Stoia says there is no chance of the Mountaineers taking St. John’s lightly on Sunday.
“We’ll be ready,” she said.
The contest will get underway at 2 p.m. and tickets can be purchased at the gate.
