DON'T TELL ANYONE, BUT BOB D. JUST SMILED
November 20, 2002 - Bob Durocher was caught smiling on Wednesday afternoon.
The St. Lawrence University men's soccer coach is well known for his doomsday attitude. He is rarely satisfied, and even thinks of ways the team could have been better during the Saints perfect 22-0-0 national championship season. How can you improve on perfection?
Durocher may have found a way.
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UCAA Player of the Year Shawn Watson has anchored a revamped St. Lawrence defense this year, and the Saints have actually improved on last year's numbers, allowing just 12 goals in 19 games this season. |
While the Saints have been far from perfect this season, they have exceeded everyone's expectations, including Durocher's. The Saints won their fourth NCAA Northeast Regional championship in the past five years with a 1-0 win over Amherst on Wednesday, and this one may be the most impressive to date. After the Saints were eliminated from the 1998 NCAA Tournament in the quarterfinal round by Williams in penalty kicks, it was no secret that the bulk of the team was returning. The team responded with the only perfect season in Division III men's soccer history, breaking a 29-year old school record with 62 goals. The Saints were upset by Hamilton in the 2000 regional championship, but again, the Saints returned the bulk of their talent the following season. The Saints went on to win 17 consecutive games, including the regional championship, allowing more than one goal only once last year. The Saints again set a record for goals in a season, scoring 63 in just 20 games. The Saints were shut out only once, a 1-0 loss eventual national champion Richard Stockton in the NCAA quarterfinals. |
The Saints graduated nine seniors from last year's team, including All-America selections Jamal Ballantyne and Ryan Carruth, Brendan Murphy, who boasted a 44-1-0 career as the starting goalkeeper, and Eric Harms, the team's leading goal scorer. To make matters worse, sophomores Steve Watson and Phillip Koshi, who both played integral roles in their rookie seasons, never stepped on the field after suffering season-ending knee injuries.
Durocher lost eleven players from last year's team, seven of whom started more than half of the Saints games last year. And yet somehow, the Saints repeated as Northeast Regional champions.
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"At the beginning of the season, I thought that we could be competitive in the region," Durocher said after the win. "But I never thought that we'd be competing at the national level. You've got to give credit to these guys. They've worked really hard." And so has Durocher. The 1999 Division III Coach of the Year, Durocher has been forced to be creative this year. The back line, the strength of Saint teams in recent years, was decimated by the injury to Steve Watson and the graduation of Allan Maragh. Shawn Watson, this year's Upstate Collegiate Athletic Association Player of the Year, was the lone returning starter on the back line. Durocher responded by moving sophomore Evan Schutt, a midfielder or forward by nature, to the back line with Watson. Add sophomore Kyle Krueger, who saw action in 14 games off the bench last season, and you have the Saints starting lineup for the majority of the season. Even with the revamped lineup, the Saints actually have a lower goals against average this year than they did last year. |
Evan Shutt has made the transition from midfield to back look easy, despite his 5'6", 140 pound frame. |
But Wednesday a new problem emerged when Krueger was unable to play due to an injury. Enter Nick Mangee.
Mangee, who has sat out most of the last two seasons with injuries of his own, was Durocher's solution to fill the hole in the Saints back line. Mangee, also a midfielder by nature, broke up a number of scoring chances and prevented even more from developing, helping the Saints hold Amherst to just five shots in the game.
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Krueger has started all but three games this season, but was forced to sit out the Saints Regional Championship game with an injury. |
"Nick did a great job today," Durocher said after the game. "He could be one of our best players, but unfortunately, he's been injured all year. But we talked to him last night, and he knows the situation, and even though he was playing out of position, he played within himself and did a great job for us today." Not bad for a player who had only appeared in eight games over the past two seasons. But the Saints have been finding a way to win all season. It hasn't always been pretty, but for the fifth consecutive season, the Saints have won 15 games. In many ways, this year's team has been more impressive than the 1999 national championship team. Certainly not in the way they have won, but the fact that they have managed to keep on winning. The Saints have come from behind to win four games. They have a 3-0-3 overtime record, beating RIT, Cortland and Union in overtime. And as the season has progressed, the team has looked more and more like a team that St. Lawrence soccer fans would recognize. |
And goodness, have they come a long way. The team that controlled the ball for well over 75% of the game on Wednesday may be wearing the same uniforms as the team that opened the season with a 1-1 tie with Geneseo thanks to a penalty kick with one minute remaining in regulation, but they certainly don't look the same.
Even as time wound down in Wednesday's one-goal game, the Saints calmly possessed the ball, running the clock and forcing Amherst to chase them all over the field. As time expired, the Saints celebrated a little, but didn't look as excited as you might expect an NCAA quarterfinal team to be. Durocher on the other hand, was beaming.
"They played great, didn't they?" he asked those around him.
But don't expect Durocher to be happy with today's win for long. Now he has to figure out how to stop Arcadia, a team that scored 72 goals in 22 games.