WVU's Abam Primed for Big Senior Season
August 17, 2017 06:15 PM | Women's Soccer
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Michaela Abam's budding track and field career lasted just one lap around the track.
One afternoon, many years ago when Abam was a fourth grader, she was recruited to blow the doors off all the little girls near her home in Houston. But just like in the children's story "The Tortoise and the Hare," Michaela's race tactics left little to be desired.
"You have to pace yourself the whole time for the end sprint," she recalled earlier this week, "and I sprinted the whole time. The last portion of the race I was done."
And so was her track career. But Abam did have a nice little fallback: soccer.
Actually, soccer has been the No. 1 thing on Abam's mind since she was about four, her parents like many of us these days investing their hard-earned cash in their daughter's youth soccer career.
However, most parents mistakenly believe their daughter is going to one day be good enough to see their investment return in the form of a college scholarship. In that respect, Michaela's parents were very, very fortunate - their daughter WAS good enough to get a free education just about anywhere she wanted to go in the country.
After first considering TCU, Abam changed her mind and picked West Virginia University, a mere 20-hour drive from Houston, minus the Morgantown traffic, of course!
"Izzo. Stoia. Marissa," Abam says of her reasons for coming to West Virginia. Those people, we all know, are coach Nikki Izzo-Brown and her two assistants Lisa Stoia and Marisa Kanela.
"Just their consistent caring and having that kind of backbone that I needed to not just build myself as a player, but as a person, too," Abam said. "I feel like if I went anywhere else I wouldn't have been who I am today. I'm really grateful and fortunate for that."
Naturally, Izzo-Brown is grateful and fortunate to have Abam, one of the top returning players in women's college soccer for 2017.
Abam was named second team All-American last year and has been a fixture on the All-Big 12 team since her freshman year when she was named Big 12 Newcomer of the Year.
World-class defenders Kadeisha Buchanan and Ashley Lawrence may have been the headliners on last year's team that reached the national championship game before falling to USC, 3-1, but it was Abam's big-time goals against Ohio State in a second-round overtime victory in Morgantown and against North Carolina in the national semifinals that got the Mountaineers there.
She has led the team in scoring all three years she's played at WVU, including last year's 12-goal, nine-assist effort that led the Big 12 in scoring.
However, one aspect of Abam's game that needs improving is her shot accuracy and decision making near the goal. She has connected on just 32 of her 100-career shot tries, a percentage Shaquille O'Neal fans were accustomed to seeing from him at the free throw line during his pro basketball career.
For soccer, that's not considered exceptional either.
Now what the Mountaineers have been able to accomplish with Abam in the starting lineup at forward the last two seasons IS exceptional - a 19-3-1 record and an Elite Eight appearance in 2016 to go with last year's breakthrough, 23-2-2 season that nearly ended with the big trophy sitting in the Dreamswork display case.
West Virginia has lost just seven matches since Abam first pulled on a Gold and Blue jersey back in 2014, and only once in Big 12 play in 2015 when the Mountaineers dropped a tournament semifinal-round game to Texas Tech.
There have also been a couple of ties against Oklahoma and TCU. That's it.
No wonder West Virginia Mountaineers continues to be written in red bold-faced type, underlined, on every single soccer bulletin board throughout the Big 12 Conference - something Abam and her teammates are well aware of.
"We always bring up the saying 'everybody wants to take the name off your back' or 'take the number off your back' and it's more of a pressure thing from our standpoint to make sure that we are keeping up the standard we have held for ourselves," Abam explained, adding, "would we rather be chasing people or having people chasing us?
"It's another motivating factor for us to do our best each and every game we play."
With the schedule Izzo-Brown has assembled this year, the Mountaineers are certainly going to have to play their best just about every time they roll out the soccer balls this fall. West Virginia opens the regular season today at Georgetown, which reached the College Cup last year and is one of the six teams in the last three years to defeat West Virginia.
Penn State, which won the national championship in 2015 and has defeated the Mountaineers twice since 2014, will be played in Morgantown on Saturday, Sept. 2. And Duke, which knocked off West Virginia in 2014, will come to Morgantown six days later on Friday, Sept. 8.
Izzo-Brown has also scheduled tough non-conference matches against preseason No. 11-ranked Virginia and Princeton, a frequent NCAA participant.
"It's exciting," Abam says of the non-league slate WVU is playing this season. "I'd rather start like that. If you think about last year we started with the same type of schedule and it brought about an initial intensity we needed for the whole season. I feel like now we're trying to build off the culture we had last year."
The team culture Abam is referencing was predominantly Canadian with national players Buchanan and Lawrence the dominant personalities last year.
They were the ones looked upon when things got tough, or spoke up when they needed to. Abam admits their presence will be missed on the field and off it.
"They were with the team for such a long time," she said.
On the field, what made them so special was their athleticism and speed that enabled Izzo-Brown to take risks on offense she wouldn't normally take because she knew Buchanan and Lawrence were fast enough to cover up their mistakes.
Abam believes the returning defenders will be good enough for the Mountaineers to continue pressing forward, albeit possibly from some different formations this year.
"We can take those same risks," Abam said. "If any mistakes happen we should be able to recover from those things. I feel we have the people capable of doing that."
While the personality of this year's team might be a little different, Abam said it's not because of a lack of personalities.
This year's team has plenty of them.
"When it comes to (goalkeeper) Rylee (Foster), we always say that Rylee is weird, but at the end of the day she is a phenomenal keeper," she chuckled. "Now we have people like (Europeans) Lois (Joel) and Grace (Smith) coming from different countries bringing their culture is really important, and seeing their style of play and how they ping balls around, I feel that's something that has been easily incorporated through our style of play."
It's a style that is tough, aggressive and exciting - a hallmark of Izzo-Brown's WVU teams dating back to those early years when she didn't have a roster full of national-class players and instead had to rely mostly on guile and guts.
This year, with players such as Abam capable of putting the ball in the back of the net far away from the goal, Izzo-Brown has enough talent to make another run at the College Cup. West Virginia begins the season ranked No. 1 in the country in the coaches' poll, a program first, and is a unanimous choice to win the Big 12 once again.
In order for these things to happen, senior players such as Michaela Abam are going to have to come through and have outstanding seasons.
"She's gotten herself into a really good place this summer," Izzo-Brown noted. "She was really focused and made sure she could control all of the things (she could control) and got herself ready."
"I feel like our senior class, building off of what has happened, it's going to be really exciting for us," Abam added. "I'm excited to start our own thing. It's not like, 'Okay, this is X's team or Y's team' - it's our team collectively. That's been a huge focal point for the season."
Speaking of focal points, Michaela Abam's name is going to be at the top of every team's scouting report this fall. She will also be one of the leading contenders to win this year's Hermann Trophy awarded to college soccer's No. 1 player. Last year's recipient was Buchanan.
Michaela certainly has a name that will be difficult for voters to forget - Michaela Abam - a perfect name for a soccer player.
Michaela has no problems with it.
"Even when I get married I don't think I'm going to change my last name," she giggled. "I'm the only child named Abam in my family. My other siblings took my dad's middle name, Nji, but for my last name they chose it to be Abam. They chose that for the last child.
"I love it."
What's not to love about her name? M-i-c-h-a-e-l-a A-b-a-m.
And, what's not to love about this West Virginia University women's soccer team?
The baton has now been passed from Buchanan back to Abam and she's not about to drop it.
She's also now smart enough to pace herself, unlike that time back in the fourth grade when she ran out of gas on the straight stretch.
She's got a full tank and she's ready to go this fall.
One afternoon, many years ago when Abam was a fourth grader, she was recruited to blow the doors off all the little girls near her home in Houston. But just like in the children's story "The Tortoise and the Hare," Michaela's race tactics left little to be desired.
"You have to pace yourself the whole time for the end sprint," she recalled earlier this week, "and I sprinted the whole time. The last portion of the race I was done."
And so was her track career. But Abam did have a nice little fallback: soccer.
Actually, soccer has been the No. 1 thing on Abam's mind since she was about four, her parents like many of us these days investing their hard-earned cash in their daughter's youth soccer career.
However, most parents mistakenly believe their daughter is going to one day be good enough to see their investment return in the form of a college scholarship. In that respect, Michaela's parents were very, very fortunate - their daughter WAS good enough to get a free education just about anywhere she wanted to go in the country.
After first considering TCU, Abam changed her mind and picked West Virginia University, a mere 20-hour drive from Houston, minus the Morgantown traffic, of course!
"Izzo. Stoia. Marissa," Abam says of her reasons for coming to West Virginia. Those people, we all know, are coach Nikki Izzo-Brown and her two assistants Lisa Stoia and Marisa Kanela.
"Just their consistent caring and having that kind of backbone that I needed to not just build myself as a player, but as a person, too," Abam said. "I feel like if I went anywhere else I wouldn't have been who I am today. I'm really grateful and fortunate for that."
Naturally, Izzo-Brown is grateful and fortunate to have Abam, one of the top returning players in women's college soccer for 2017.
Abam was named second team All-American last year and has been a fixture on the All-Big 12 team since her freshman year when she was named Big 12 Newcomer of the Year.
World-class defenders Kadeisha Buchanan and Ashley Lawrence may have been the headliners on last year's team that reached the national championship game before falling to USC, 3-1, but it was Abam's big-time goals against Ohio State in a second-round overtime victory in Morgantown and against North Carolina in the national semifinals that got the Mountaineers there.
She has led the team in scoring all three years she's played at WVU, including last year's 12-goal, nine-assist effort that led the Big 12 in scoring.
However, one aspect of Abam's game that needs improving is her shot accuracy and decision making near the goal. She has connected on just 32 of her 100-career shot tries, a percentage Shaquille O'Neal fans were accustomed to seeing from him at the free throw line during his pro basketball career.
For soccer, that's not considered exceptional either.
Now what the Mountaineers have been able to accomplish with Abam in the starting lineup at forward the last two seasons IS exceptional - a 19-3-1 record and an Elite Eight appearance in 2016 to go with last year's breakthrough, 23-2-2 season that nearly ended with the big trophy sitting in the Dreamswork display case.
West Virginia has lost just seven matches since Abam first pulled on a Gold and Blue jersey back in 2014, and only once in Big 12 play in 2015 when the Mountaineers dropped a tournament semifinal-round game to Texas Tech.
There have also been a couple of ties against Oklahoma and TCU. That's it.
No wonder West Virginia Mountaineers continues to be written in red bold-faced type, underlined, on every single soccer bulletin board throughout the Big 12 Conference - something Abam and her teammates are well aware of.
"We always bring up the saying 'everybody wants to take the name off your back' or 'take the number off your back' and it's more of a pressure thing from our standpoint to make sure that we are keeping up the standard we have held for ourselves," Abam explained, adding, "would we rather be chasing people or having people chasing us?
"It's another motivating factor for us to do our best each and every game we play."
With the schedule Izzo-Brown has assembled this year, the Mountaineers are certainly going to have to play their best just about every time they roll out the soccer balls this fall. West Virginia opens the regular season today at Georgetown, which reached the College Cup last year and is one of the six teams in the last three years to defeat West Virginia.
Penn State, which won the national championship in 2015 and has defeated the Mountaineers twice since 2014, will be played in Morgantown on Saturday, Sept. 2. And Duke, which knocked off West Virginia in 2014, will come to Morgantown six days later on Friday, Sept. 8.
Izzo-Brown has also scheduled tough non-conference matches against preseason No. 11-ranked Virginia and Princeton, a frequent NCAA participant.
"It's exciting," Abam says of the non-league slate WVU is playing this season. "I'd rather start like that. If you think about last year we started with the same type of schedule and it brought about an initial intensity we needed for the whole season. I feel like now we're trying to build off the culture we had last year."
The team culture Abam is referencing was predominantly Canadian with national players Buchanan and Lawrence the dominant personalities last year.
They were the ones looked upon when things got tough, or spoke up when they needed to. Abam admits their presence will be missed on the field and off it.
"They were with the team for such a long time," she said.
On the field, what made them so special was their athleticism and speed that enabled Izzo-Brown to take risks on offense she wouldn't normally take because she knew Buchanan and Lawrence were fast enough to cover up their mistakes.
Abam believes the returning defenders will be good enough for the Mountaineers to continue pressing forward, albeit possibly from some different formations this year.
"We can take those same risks," Abam said. "If any mistakes happen we should be able to recover from those things. I feel we have the people capable of doing that."
While the personality of this year's team might be a little different, Abam said it's not because of a lack of personalities.
This year's team has plenty of them.
"When it comes to (goalkeeper) Rylee (Foster), we always say that Rylee is weird, but at the end of the day she is a phenomenal keeper," she chuckled. "Now we have people like (Europeans) Lois (Joel) and Grace (Smith) coming from different countries bringing their culture is really important, and seeing their style of play and how they ping balls around, I feel that's something that has been easily incorporated through our style of play."
It's a style that is tough, aggressive and exciting - a hallmark of Izzo-Brown's WVU teams dating back to those early years when she didn't have a roster full of national-class players and instead had to rely mostly on guile and guts.
This year, with players such as Abam capable of putting the ball in the back of the net far away from the goal, Izzo-Brown has enough talent to make another run at the College Cup. West Virginia begins the season ranked No. 1 in the country in the coaches' poll, a program first, and is a unanimous choice to win the Big 12 once again.
In order for these things to happen, senior players such as Michaela Abam are going to have to come through and have outstanding seasons.
"She's gotten herself into a really good place this summer," Izzo-Brown noted. "She was really focused and made sure she could control all of the things (she could control) and got herself ready."
"I feel like our senior class, building off of what has happened, it's going to be really exciting for us," Abam added. "I'm excited to start our own thing. It's not like, 'Okay, this is X's team or Y's team' - it's our team collectively. That's been a huge focal point for the season."
Speaking of focal points, Michaela Abam's name is going to be at the top of every team's scouting report this fall. She will also be one of the leading contenders to win this year's Hermann Trophy awarded to college soccer's No. 1 player. Last year's recipient was Buchanan.
Michaela certainly has a name that will be difficult for voters to forget - Michaela Abam - a perfect name for a soccer player.
Michaela has no problems with it.
"Even when I get married I don't think I'm going to change my last name," she giggled. "I'm the only child named Abam in my family. My other siblings took my dad's middle name, Nji, but for my last name they chose it to be Abam. They chose that for the last child.
"I love it."
What's not to love about her name? M-i-c-h-a-e-l-a A-b-a-m.
And, what's not to love about this West Virginia University women's soccer team?
The baton has now been passed from Buchanan back to Abam and she's not about to drop it.
She's also now smart enough to pace herself, unlike that time back in the fourth grade when she ran out of gas on the straight stretch.
She's got a full tank and she's ready to go this fall.
Players Mentioned
D
/ Women's Soccer
MF
/ Women's SoccerNikki Izzo-Brown & Alicia Riggins | Wagner Postgame | Nov. 14
Saturday, November 15
Nikki Izzo-Brown | Nov. 10
Monday, November 10
WSOC | Cincinnati Cinematic Recap
Friday, October 31
Ajanae Respass | Cincinnati Postgame | Oct. 30
Thursday, October 30
