Forget the 1-7 football team. Championship women’s soccer rules at Brown University this fall.
The Bears are 14-1-2, Ivy League champions and bound for the NCAA Tournament starting this weekend. They have the Ivy League coach of the year, Kia McNeill; the Ivy rookie of the year, forward Brittany Raphino; four first-team All-Ivy selections, midfielder Abby Carchio, center back Sydney Cummings, keeper Kayla Thompson, and Raphino; one second-team choice, forward Ava Seelenfreund, and one honorable mention, forward Star White.
This is Brown’s best women’s soccer team in 25 years, or since the Bears won their last Ivy title in 1994. Their 14 victories are a program record, and they were 6-0-1 in the Ivy League, the tie a 1-1 game at Yale in the season finale last weekend.
“I always knew we had the potential to have a great season because we were returning the 2018 leading point getter in the Ivy League with Abby Carchio, the 2018 rookie of the year with Rebecca Rosen, had five All-American freshmen coming in, and also had a lot of players who had gotten a lot of minutes in the 2018 season,” McNeill wrote in an email.
Brown’s only loss was a 1-0 setback at Villanova on Sept. 22. The Bears played a sloppy first half and outplayed the Wildcats after the break but couldn’t score.
“Of course I would love to erase that one loss off our schedule, but in some ways it was good for us to take a loss and know what that feels like and know that we never want to feel that way again,” McNeill wrote.
The other tie was a scoreless game at Texas A&M on Sept. 8.
This is McNeill’s fourth season at Brown after six years as an assistant at Boston College and Northeastern. The Bears were 20-7-5 in her first two years but slipped to 8-8-1 last year.
“I think my first two seasons were better than expected,” she said, “and 2018 was the first year we went through some real adversity as a team. We had to deal with injuries to key players . . . we lost a couple of games due to small mistakes, and we had to rely on a really young roster.”
She has produced an Ivy League defensive player of the year, two rookies of the year and 17 All-Ivy players. This success reminds me of the glory days of Brown women’s soccer, when the Bears under coach Phil Pincince won 12 Ivy championships from 1980 to 1994.
McNeill predicts more winning in Brown’s future.
“The scary thing is our team can be so much better than we have shown thus far this year. We still have some untapped potential which we will hone in on in the off-season so that we can be even stronger next year,” she said.
First, though, is the NCAA Tournament. Brown, No. 16 in the United Soccer Coaches national poll and No. 1 in the East, will play Monmouth Saturday at 12:30 on its home pitch, Stevenson-Pincince Field. This will be the Bears seventh NCAA appearance. Monmouth is 14-2-2 and making its fourth consecutive appearance and seventh overall.
Monmouth boasts the best defense in the nation, having allowed only four goals. Brown is second with six. Brown is 11-0-0 at home this season, but Monmouth is 7-0-2 on the road and riding a 13-game winning streak. This match has the potential to be a great one.
McNeill likes Brown’s chances, predicting “this team can make a deep run.”
The football team? Those Bears are 1-7 overall, 0-5 in the Ivy League, 120th in total defense of 124 teams in Division I Football Championship Subdivision, and 122nd in scoring defense. They are averaging 502.6 yards and 43.6 points allowed per game. They’re at Columbia (3-5, 2-3) Saturday.
