1. What teams from the WCC would get your nod to the NCAA tournament? Who besides SCU and Portland could make a run at the WCC title? I think Santa Clara University, Portland, Pepperdine, Loyola Marymount, Saint Mary's, and San Diego all have a very good chance of making the NCAA Tournament. Of those teams, USD has the bigger challenge in front of them, but just having played them, I know they are a very good team. I think their earlier tie against USC is evidence of the quality of their team. They have a very good coach and brought their team to the tournament most years. I think those six teams have a great chance of making the NCAA Tournament.
In terms of who will make a run at the WCC title, I think that's wide open. The last few years, it's come down to the last weekend, with three or four different teams having a shot at the title. We hope that we're there, but I think it's very wide open. It's hard to pick a favorite; we're just in a very tough conference.
2. How different is the SCU team with women's national team members present compared to SCU with them gone due to national team duties? And does this present major problems in your title defense?
We try to look at that situation as if we have one or two players out with injury. Teams have to deal with that quite often. What really hurts us is when we have missing players with the National Team AND some injuries within our team. Rather than missing a couple of player due to their National Team commitments, we may be missing three or four players. Our first game of the year, against Stanford, we had as many as five players that were not available to us. That's when it really has an impact; we get into a depth issue. We are losing Aly Wagner again next week. No question that when you lose a player of Aly's ability, it's going to have an impact with the team. She is a starting player on the National Team. She's one of the best 11 players in the country "at any age" so obviously at the college level, she's a tremendous player. When she is missing, it has an impact with our team. As long as we have the rest of our group healthy, I think we still have a solid team, and a team that's capable of winning against anyone that we play. An example of that was in our UCLA match earlier this year. We found ourselves down 1-0 on the road and Aly was injured and not able to play, yet we found a way to come from behind and win the game against a very talented UCLA. So, it definitely has impact, but it's not something that we can't overcome.
3. Kristi Candau is the second leading scorer on the team. Why do you still have her coming off the bench?
In our sport, we make substitutions every game and we need players to come off the bench. It's a very difficult role, but at the same time, a very valuable role on the team. Kristi has done great coming off the bench for us. Kristi has also done well when starting games for us. Her goal and assist totals are a little higher when she comes of the bench and I can't explain all the reasons for that, but she is filling a very valuable role for us. Players find it very difficult to come off the bench and make an impact in the game, and Kristi is able to do that, obviously scoring a great number of goals for us against Notre Dame, UCLA and some of the top teams on our schedule and doing that while coming off the bench. For the foreseeable future, that's the role she will continue to play for our team.
4. With two teams in the top five and the recent success of Pepperdine, do you think the WCC is the toughest conference?
Last year we sent five teams to the NCAA Tournament. Two of those team went to the final four. This year, Santa Clara and Portland are currently ranked in the top five. We have Pepperdine, LMU, who just beat Pepperdine, and Saint Mary's who was in the top 10 all year last year, so we have a very tough conference. It's really hard to tell if we have the toughest conference in the country, but I would have to say the WCC and the Pac-10 are the two toughest. The ACC is also very tough, but if you look at the number of teams that go to the NCAA Tournament from the WCC and the Pac-10 and how they do when they get there, you can obviously make a very strong argument for the WCC being the toughest conference in women's soccer.
5. What kind of impact has the loss of 3 starters had on the Broncos in their defense of the national title?
Every year we have key players leave our program. If we're doing our jobs as coaches, we've recruited great players here and four years later they are even better players. When they leave, they leave a void. A void in terms of their impact on the team, their leadership, and this year is no different. Losing Danielle Slaton, Anna Kraus and Kerry Cathcart from our starting lineup has been difficult for us, but something that we are starting to overcome. Players are starting to step up and I think we are starting to play some pretty good soccer right now.
This year has been a little bit more difficult than most. We not only lost those three key players from our team, we had a lot of players missing last spring, due to their National Team commitments. The spring season is the time of the year that we build the new team. We had training sessions last spring where there were only six or seven players on the field and that??'s no way to build a new team. I think as difficult as it is to replace those three players, what has really hurt us was not having a spring season, not having 11 players in a spring practice at any one time. That really took its toll on us the first half the season, but now we??re really come together. The team is starting to play well. I think the lack of a quality spring season had more impact of our slow start than the loss of three graduating seniors. Obviously, Anna and Danielle were first round draft picks in the WUSA and Danielle is a starter for the U.S. National Team and was the defender of the year in the WUSA and those players do not come around very often, but at the same time, we've had key players like Brandi Chastain, Mandy Clemens, Nikki Serlenga, Jen Lalor that we've had to replace, so it somehow always turns out.
6. How does this year's team compare to last years?
I think we're very similar team to last year's team. In place of Kerry Cathcart, we have a very talented freshman in Micaela Esquivel doing a great job for us. And the two center back positions that were held by Anna Kraus and Danielle Slaton have sophomore Jaclyn Campi and junior Chardonnay Poole and both are having outstanding seasons for us. The difference is that and they're replacing three seniors. So we're not quite as experienced. We only have two seniors on the field for us in Devvyn Hawkins and Aly Wagner, and often times Aly is not here, so we don't have as much senior leadership on the field as we did last year. That's probably the biggest difference between this year's team and last year's team.
7. Was winning the national title last season the highlight of your coaching career so far? Did you feel like you got a monkey off your back?
I've had many highlights in coaching: at the youth level, at the college level, and here at the Santa Clara University in the years that we didn't??1 win the national championship, I've had many, many highlights. These last two years, I have been coaching the U.S. U-21 National Team and won two world championships, but I'd have to say that winning that national championship at Santa Clara University this past year has been the single greatest highlight that I've had in coaching. In my 15th season, having been close so many times and finally getting over the hurdle, it certainly was a great thrill. To play North Carolina in the championship game and to beat the team that wins most women's soccer national championships, was a great feeling.
As to the second part of the question, I felt like we got the monkey off our back in the semifinal. The semifinal is where we've had our difficulty. In seven previous trips to the final four, we didn't get past the semifinal. In most of those years, we were the better team. We came close to not advancing last year in the semifinal. We were up 2-0 and squandered the lead to Florida, forcing us to win in overtime. That was certainly nerve-wracking, but it was absolutely thrilling to win the semifinal. I think we had more emotion in winning the semifinal than we did in the championship game and that was probably because we felt like we go the monkey off our back. The championship game was obviously a thrill. We've defeated North Carolina the last two times we've played them, in 1999 and in 2001, so the 1999 season kind of got the monkey off our back against UNC and 2001 got the monkey off our back in being able to finally win the semifinal.
8. What things does the team need to improve on to defend their title?
There are two big areas that we need to improve upon. The first is we have to become better at possessing the ball. We still turn the ball over unnecessarily way too much for a team that wants to make a run at the title. The other area is converting our chances. We keep track of our scoring percentage, that is the number of goals you score in terms of the number of shots you take, and our percentage is down right now. It's going to take a scoring percentage of 20-25 percent to win the National Championship. Those are the two biggest areas that we have to work on, and see improvement in, if we're going to make a run at the end of the year. We are getting better in those areas and I think we will be one of the toughest teams to beat at the end of the year.