Girton's Travels
November 11, 2004 10:58 AM | General
November 11, 2004
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Rusty Girton was among 11 freshmen recruits in 2000 that were supposed to make their mark on the West Virginia men’s soccer program. Today, Girton, a 5-foot-11, 160-pound defender, is the only one left.
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| Senior Rusty Girton has helped transform a losing men's soccer program into a winning one.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks |
“When I came in we had an unbelievable recruiting class and we beat out all of the seniors,” Girton remembers. “Everybody said that we were a good young team but we never did anything with it.”
Actually most of them did do something: they transferred to other schools.
“A lot of the players weren’t happy so a lot left and that kind of started the downward spiral that we went in to,” Girton said.
The Mountaineers slipped into the abyss and it has taken two coaches to pull them out of it. During Girton’s first year in 2000 West Virginia went 4-13-1. Girton took a medical redshirt in 2001 only to watch WVU forge a disappointing 5-11 record. After that season, Paul Marco, a former West Virginia player under longtime WVU coach John McGrath, chose to leave his alma mater and take a job Binghamton.
Keith Fulk replaced Marco in 2002 and completely changed the mindset of the team. No longer were the players calling the shots. Those who didn’t buy into the program were no longer welcomed.
Despite Fulk’s get-tough stance, Girton credits him with reinvigorating his passion for the sport.
“I played my freshman year and didn’t play my sophomore year and the attitude of the team was like, ‘We’re just here to have fun. Soccer is just something to do on the side.’ When Keith and Mike Seabolt got here they tried to get us focused more on playing to win and trying to instill a winning environment.”
Having the right mindset is one thing. Having the right players is another. West Virginia posted another losing campaign in Fulk’s only season at WVU (4-11-2).
Seabolt took over for Fulk on an interim basis last year and could manage just a 5-10-3 mark. Girton admits that was probably the most depressing season of his career.
“We were good enough to win and we lost a lot of games by just a goal,” he said. “We expected to do better. Before that no one really cared.”
Making things even more difficult to stomach was the fact that Nikki Izzo-Brown’s women’s soccer program was taking off. West Virginia reached the Top 10 last year for the first time in school history and is in the midst of five straight NCAA tournament appearances.
The men, meanwhile, endured four straight losing seasons and were becoming a sort of side show to the women.
“We definitely felt second-tier,” Girton said. “The women’s team was turning it up and starting to be very good so everyone was talking about them. We didn’t get any media coverage because we weren’t doing very well and nobody really cared.
“There was some jealousy between the men’s team and the women’s team,” he added.
The engineering major was prepared to handle the questions and critiques from friends and other students on why the team was so bad and what could be done to make the situation better. But no one ever asked. They didn’t care and that was probably the toughest thing for him to deal with.
“Unless you told them you were on the soccer team nobody really knew anything about it. It wasn’t that they knew we were bad, they didn’t even know we were around,” Rusty said.
Girton, an Asheville, N.C., native, was able to use his school work as a way to channel out all of the tough losses: even the embarrassing ones like the 8-0 loss to Rutgers his freshman season. Put in other terms, that is like losing 56-0 in football.
“When we were losing I would go to the lab and work on a project. When you were doing well in school that was kind of a way to forget about soccer,” Girton said.
It even got to the point last summer when Girton was depressed about the prospect of coming back to school to begin practicing for what he thought was going to be another losing season this year.
Girton played on a very good summer team in Colorado with WVU teammates Aaron Pitchkolan and Devon McTavish.
“We just kept talking about how terrible it was going to be to go back to West Virginia and go from a winning team to a team we figured was going to be around .500 at best,” Girton said.
But Seabolt, promoted to full-time coach last winter, and his hard-working assistants Scott Bowers and Bryan Green had other ideas. They worked their tails off to land a 13-player freshmen class. From the very first practice Girton could tell that this group might make a difference. Several of them wound up starting, just like Girton’s freshmen group in 2000.
“They’re definitely the most talented recruiting class we’ve had,” Girton said. “They’re more talented than my recruiting class and I thought my recruiting class was talented.”
The influx of young, talented players and another year in Seabolt’s system have sparked a dramatic turnaround for the men’s program. The Mountaineers have made a seven-game improvement over last year’s win total of five.
WVU won five conference matches this season alone, topping the total of four Big East matches won over a four-year period from 2000-03. West Virginia went four years without beating a ranked team before knocking off No. 9 Notre Dame, 1-0 in Morgantown earlier this season.
Last weekend, West Virginia stunned No. 11-ranked St. John’s, 1-0 on its home field in the Big East tournament quarterfinals, marking the first time in school history West Virginia has advanced to the Big East tournament semifinals.
Earlier this week, Soccer America put West Virginia in its Top 20 at No. 17. For those following the West Virginia men’s program, 2004 has been a remarkable year in every aspect.
Girton, the one guy on the team who has seen it all, understandably is having the time of his life. “I don’t want it to end,” he said. “I think I say that every day in practice. I’m staying until December,” he said.
Girton realizes that this year’s Big East tournament is now wide open with all four of the top seeds losing in the first round. Therefore, No. 7-seeded West Virginia (12-6-1) has as good a chance as anyone to win the tournament and claim the conference’s automatic NCAA tournament berth.
He says the turning point in the season came after a tough, 1-0 loss at Seton Hall on Oct. 9 when the team felt like it should have won that match.
“It was a very tough loss for us because we felt like that was the first time we went somewhere on the road and felt like we were the better team and should have won but we didn’t,” Girton said. “Since then we haven’t lost a game.”
Heading into Friday night’s match against Connecticut, West Virginia is 5-0-1, having defeated Robert Morris, Providence, Villanova, Pitt, Delaware and tying Rutgers.
Girton says confidence is at an all-time high among the players. The team is going to Piscataway, N.J., this weekend with the intention of winning the conference tournament.
Even if they fall short, Girton and WVU’s other two seniors, Aaron Pitchkolan and Bernard Ouassa, can take solace in the fact that they started a new winning tradition at West Virginia. And for once, Girton can actually bring up soccer to his friends and family. Who knows maybe Girton will come back for a homecoming football game 10 years from now and tell people he was on that great 2004 WVU soccer team?
“It would be great to come back in five or 10 years and say that I started the tradition that West Virginia is a powerhouse in men’s soccer,” he said.
Who knows?
