Virginia Women’s Soccer: Postmortem on a Season

One fan's guide to some systemic issues that are keeping Steve Swanson and Co. from scaling the heights.

Virginia Athletic

2019 was a pretty good year for Virginia athletics.  Tony Bennett, most famously of course, brought home the national championship in men’s hoops with a redemption arc better than any found in Hollywood.  Not to be outdone, men’s lacrosse won not only the ACC tournament but also a natty of their own.  Virginia football, squarely in the Bryce Perkins era, went to the Orange Bowl.   And women’s soccer spent eight consecutive weeks as the nation’s #1 team.

Men’s basketball and football, most notably, have had a pretty steep slide down from those heights, but the women’s soccer program may be staring at a similar abyss.  Head coach Steve Swanson has been at the University for 25 seasons now.  In his first 23 three years he had never missed the ACC Tournament – and he’s done it twice now – and he also missed the NCAA Tournament.

Eight years ago when I started covering ACC women’s soccer, I often referred to the Big Three of the ACC:  Florida State, UNC and Virginia.  But Virginia has finished 7th and 9th the past two years while FSU has lapped the field, winning the national championship four times in a decade and 10 of the past 12 ACC tournaments.  Now, I am not suggesting that the game has passed Steve Swanson by, as it did for Bobby Bowden or Joe Paterno, but the ACC landscape has changed.  Mark Krikorian is gone from FSU, Anson Dorrance at UNC pulled a Tony Bennett and left his program days before the start of the season, and Duke’s Robbie Church announced his retirement at the beginning of the season.

So where does the team go from here?

Speed

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a coach who is seemingly as averse to speed as Swanson is.  Defender Laney Rouse is fast and forwards Meredith McDermott and Sophia Bradley are quick.  And that’s about it.  No Virginia player since before Rebecca Jarrett’s first ACL tear has had the kind of speed that opposing coaches have to game plan around.  No one on the team can blow by a defender like FSU’s Jordynn Dudley or Wake Forest’s Caiya Hanks.

But, as any Virginia basketball fan will tell you, speed is not as important as pace, and man o man, these women play at a pace that would make Tony Bennett proud.  There is very little urgency on this team.  Every free kick is very deliberate.  Every throw in is taken by an outside defensive back.  Seriously, I watched every game but one, and I witnessed only three free kicks that were taken by the player closest to the ball.  Virginia is fouled maybe an average of 10 times per game, so that’s well over 200 free kicks.  Only three times was the other team’s defense not allowed ample time to reset.

Throw ins are even more ponderous.  Only seven times did a midfielder or forward seek a tactical advantage by taking a quick throw.  Every other throw, wherever it is on the pitch, was taken by two defenders.  Now, I have my outside backs on my middle school girls team take 100% of the throws because we only practice twice a week.  I don’t have time for four or five sessions for the entire team to practice their throws.  Does Swanson know that you cannot be offside on a throw in?

If you’ve ever watched London Perrantes or Kihei Clark walk the ball up the court when there was a chance to break, you know what it feels like to watch these women take a free kick or a throw in.

The Press

Virginia struggled all year long with teams that pressed them high up the pitch.  There’s a couple of reasons for that.  Opponent team speed has increased vis a vis slower Virginians, goal-kicks not having to travel outside of the box invites teams to pull their central defenders in almost to the six-yard box, and keeper Victoria Safradin’s distribution is really pretty bad.  (If she is under any kind of pressure when she receives a back pass from a teammate, she’s going to shank the ball away out of bounds.)

Even three, five, eight years ago, a Steve Swanson team was going to control the midfield and the lion’s share of possession, even against Florida State and North Carolina.  Virginia rarely controls the midfield anymore, even against middling ACC teams, so when a team struggles to even advance the ball past the midfield, the entire game plan comes crashing to the ground.

Conversely, Virginia cannot press the other team.  Pressing requires coordination.  All the midfielders and forwards have to be on the same page.  When Virginia did try to press, it was mostly Meredith McDermott running late, and from 10 yards away, at a defender who had multiple options.  Meanwhile, her teammates were pointing fingers.  And that’s never a good sign. In any sport.

The future of the game is pressing, and being able to advance the ball out of the back in the face of such pressing.  Swanson needs to bring in a new coach who can help him with this facet of the modern game.

Injuries

Let’s just stipulate that injuries suck.  And Virginia is not the only team that has seasons destroyed by injuries.  Ask any Philadelphia 76ers fan about how cruel injuries can be.  Injuries can be random – we’ve all seen women crumple, without contact, lost for a year due to a torn ACL – and some players are just injury prone.  (Exhibit A: Joel Embiid. Oh heck, Exhibit B: Paul George.)  Virginia has been ravaged these past couple years and maybe it is time to re-examine Virginia’s training and strength regimen.

Lia Godfrey got hurt spring of 2023, missed all last season and returned this year.  But it took her well over two months to get match fit and three months before she had any semblance of her old speed.  Emma Dawson got hurt that same spring, and she never returned.  Laney Rouse got injured first game of the season last year and was so slow to recover that she didn’t even touch a ball until the second week of summer practice.  Mia Hoen-Beck and Laughlin Ryan each sustained season-ending injuries in their first and second and third years on Grounds.  Anna Sumpter tore her ACL three times while at Virginia.  Now, she’s a special case because she’d tore her ACL two times prior to joining the team. 

Again, injuries are random, nay, fickle.  I saw Sydney Zandi pop something and crumple well away from the ball.  Just this year, Alexis Theoret succumbed to a non-contact injury.  Every person is different and I’m certainly not privy to specifics on any of these injuries, but I do know that if I was a coach with the injury history I’ve just described, I would be doing something different from what I had been doing.  Because the old way ain’t working.

Either that, or get dirt on Mike Curtis, the legendary men’s basketball strength and conditioning coach, and “convince” him to come work for the soccer team.

Penalties

In the 2015 season, Virginia was involved in two penalty shootouts.  In the ACC semifinal, the Hoos fell to FSU, but they made six of seven penalties.  In the fourth round of the NCAA tournament, the Cavaliers lost to Rutgers, converting five of eight from the penalty spot.  But since then, the women have been in two penalty shootouts and have combined to go two of seven.  A penalty shootout is the most gut-wrenching cauldron in all of sport.  But two of seven?  Yikes.

I don’t know how much time Swanson spends on penalties, and he’s the coach who has had to address his team after these two heart-breakers, but one thing I would do is find a new PK taker for next year.  Maggie Cagle was the primary penalty taker this year and she was just three for five.  Yuna McCormack and Lia Godfrey took textbook perfect PKs in the season-ending loss to Wisconsin.  I’d have one of those two be the primary spot-kick taker for next season.

Scoring

Beginning with the 2013 season and continuing for nine years til the 2021 season, the Cavaliers were the highest scoring team in women’s soccer.  And it wasn’t particularly close:  Stanford, BYU and Penn State were 40 – 50 goals behind in Virginia’s rear view mirror.  That’s not the case anymore.  In 10 ACC games this year, the team was shutout three times and scored a grand total of 13 goals.  That’s a formula for mid-table mediocrity there.

Injuries and absences to midfield played a big part in this failure.  Lia Godfrey took forever to come back as the force she’d been prior to her injury.  Yuna McCormack missed six games for the U20 Women’s World Cup.  Jill Flammia, a woman with a nose for goal, was lost for the season.  If healthy, I presume these three women will be the starting midfield next year, and the entire team will be more dangerous as a result.

The forwards aren’t scoring either.  From 2017 to 2021 Virginia had four 15-goal scorers:  Meg McCool, Diana Ordonez (twice) and Haley Hopkins.  This year Cagle, McDermott and Allie Ross combined for 17 goals total.  Four of the 17 were penalties, which count of course, but it means that just 13 goals were created in the run of play.

Transfers

In the wild west of the transfer portal and unlimited player movement and the advent of NIL money effectively wiping out the age-old amateur model, Virginia is usually at a disadvantage across all sports.  This school is not going to be throwing bags of money at anyone, and admissions requirements apply to everyone.  This is less of an obstacle for women’s soccer.  It’s a niche sport and nobody is paying over the top for female soccer players.  And female athletes tend to do better grade wise than the general undergrad population.   There should be fewer structural barriers that would prevent Swanson to get more immediate help, should he want it.

Swanson has utilized the transfer portal to good effect the past seven or eight years.  Defenders Sarah Clark and Chloe Japic were reliable defenders and each was here for three years.  Haley Hopkins was here for two years and proved she was an All-American and ended up an NWSL first-round draft pick.  And this year Moira Kelley walked into the starting lineup and probably led the team in minutes played.  And because Swanson is a fine coach who runs a great program and has been here for 25 years now, few players leave the program.  The most significant loss in recent years was Ashlynn Serepca, who never got established at Virginia, and ended up fashioning a decent career with two years at Alabama.

The point is that Swanson could probably be as active, and successful, as he wanted to be mining the transfer portal.  This team needs goal-scoring help, hopefully Swanson recognizes that.

Let’s Not be all Doom & Gloom

As near as I can tell, the National Soccer Hall of Fame is barely a thing, and it doesn’t appear to have criteria for coaches.  Now, if the Soccer HoF was anything like the Basketball HoF, Steve Swanson would be in it.  He’s run an awesome program over his 25 years at Virginia which has played some beautiful soccer, and he’s the kind of coach any parent would want to entrust their daughter to.

There is a lot of talent on this team.  A prospective midfield of Lia Godfrey, Yuna McCormack and Jill Flammia will be the equal of anyone in the country.  Swanson never stops developing players as the growth that Kiki Maki, in her fourth year, and Tatum Galvin, in her third, attests to.  Most of the team is returning; the most significant loss will be the graduation of Alexis Theoret.  How successful Ella Carter is in stepping into the defensive midfield role full time will go a long way towards determining how successful the 2025 season will be.

And we will be here every step of the way.  Thanks for reading!