Cavaliers Now

Virginia Women’s Soccer Falls from Ranks of Undefeated, 3-0 vs Wake Forest

Wake beat down UVa in the first half before coasting in the second to hand the Cavaliers their worst loss in five years.

Val Prochaska

Virginia Athletics

The sporting weekend had started so nicely:  the field hockey team knocked off Maryland and Florida State’s football team continued their calendar-year implosion by falling toothlessly to Memphis.  (Sweet, sweet schadenfreude.)  But after the men laid an egg at Scott Stadium versus Maryland, the women did so similarly at Klöckner.  The Deacons were up 3-0 at the half and took their foot off the gas in the second, so the score line actually flatters the Cavaliers.

Last year, Wake Forest defeated Virginia 2-0 and they finished as the sixth, and final, seed in the ACC tournament, effectively ending Virginia’s year.  This year’s version is one of the most senior teams in recent memory, returning 19 fourth- and fifth-year seniors, 29 returners overall and roughly 90% of their scoring and minutes played from last year.

Make no mistake, this is Wake’s year and they are making the most of it.  In their midweek game against UNC, the Deacons outplayed the Tar Heels, finishing with over 60% of the possession and  outshooting UNC 22-3.  Soccer can be a fickle game.  UNC scored on one of those three shots and escaped with the victory.

Virginia wouldn’t be so fortunate.

This game was a microcosm of the challenges that head coach Steve Swanson has faced this year.  Through nine games, Swanson has used eight different starting lineups.  For most of the eight years now that I have been watching closely, Swanson has rolled out a fairly vanilla 4 – 3 – 3 with wingers and outside midfielders spread very wide.  I’m not saying that Swanson is tactically naïve by any stretch, but through these nine games, he’s used four different formations.  This is not tactical flexibility, rather it’s a response to glaring absences, for the second year in a row, and closer to desperation than not.

The injuries that Emma Dawson, Lia Godfrey and Laney Rouse must have been especially severe because a year and half later, we still haven’t seen Dawson and Godfrey is a step slow.  Godfrey’s touch is still sublime, but she doesn’t have the separation she used to have.  Rouse, injured in the first game of summer, only started running in June, and she, too, has lost a step.  Throw in a season-ending injury to Jill Flammia and Yuna McCormack’s absence for the rest of the month with the women’s national U20 team, and this team is pretty bare bones.

Oh, and Maggie Cagle has been fighting off an unspecified illness the past week.  She didn’t start for the second straight game, played just 20 minutes and never returned for the second half.

But anybody who has been following my coverage of the women knows that I have made these laments before.  And the concern that Virginia has had trouble bringing out the ball from the back, which has the knock-on effect of making their midfielders less composed on the ball when they do get the ball and therefore, less likely to be able to control midfield.

These issues have been here for the first eight games, and I’ve moaned about them, but Virginia had nonetheless prevailed, and at 8-0, were only one of six Division I teams to sport a perfect record.  But Wake brought a team speed that was the difference maker, a speed that Virginia simply couldn’t match.

For as great a coach as Swanson is, I’ve never seen a coach so averse to speed.  He must not value it because he doesn’t recruit it.  Sophia Bradley and Meredith McDermott are quick, but Aniyah Collier seemingly has been lost for the season, and Rouse has lost a step.  Virginia could not keep up with Caiya Hanks, who boatraced the Cavaliers all game long and scored this brace. 

The Hoos don’t have an answer for this kind of speed on defense and they cannot create that kind of offense.  Both McDermott and Bradley received balls in the kind of space Hanks did for that second goal, and they were pretty easily defended.

Wake’s Hanks scored 15 minutes into the half, and then Wake scored twice, two minutes apart late in the first half to ice the game.  In between the goals, Hanks could have had a third goal and Kristin Johnson skied a volley from the edge of the six-yard box.  In other words, the score could have been much worse.  In the second half the Deacs defended much deeper, but with the proven speed to catch the Cavs on the counter, Virginia still wasn’t able to control midfield.

I don’t really know where Virginia goes from here.  A team with Cagle, Godfrey and Alexis Theoret has more talent than most of the teams in the ACC.  And Swanson is not sitting back, he’s trying to put his charges in the proverbial position to succeed, but I am unsure as to why he’s abandoned the 4 – 3 – 3.  Yuna McCormack, who’s have a successful stint with national U20s, is coming back.  Cagle will presumably get well.  The team will get better.  Maybe that’s when Swanson plans on returning to the 4 – 3 – 3 but that may be too late.  Swanson has three good midfielders because second year Ella Carter has looked solid thus far and I think she could handle a bigger role.  Both Linda Mittermair and Laughlin Ryan are more than adequate coming off the bench.

In the meantime, the women have a week off before hosting Notre Dame next Saturday, September 21st.  Swanson has been more intentional about giving the women more time to adequately recover between games, as he chose to schedule only seven non-conference games (he could have added an eighth) and the ACC added an extra week as well.  I suspect the women will need this week off because for the past three years, Notre Dame has been the second fastest team in the ACC and I expect Virginia’s back line to be mightily challenged.

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Val Prochaska

VAL PROCHASKA

Val graduated from the University of Virginia in the last millennium, back when writing one's senior thesis by hand was still a thing. He is a lifelong fan of the ACC, having chosen the Tobacco Road conference ahead of the Big East. Again, when that was still a thing. Val has covered Virginia men's basketball for seven years, first with HoosPlace and then with StreakingTheLawn, before joining us here at Virginia Cavaliers on SI in August of 2023, continuing to cover UVA men's basketball and also writing about women's soccer and women's basketball.