UNC Tar Heels 2018

So what's happening with the UNC women's uniforms??? They appeared to have played the game on Saturday in Duke Blue kits???? The only thing that identified the jerseys as UNC (and you had to get the video to hold still and then look closely...) was the piping design down the side.

And then I noticed that the UNC men played at Notre Dame in what looked like all black kits.

Is this some new style that UNC is pioneering where the kit color doesn't matter as long as a little logo or piping down the side indicates that there might be a Tarheel in the jersey?

 

Confused at the tone of the comments. They read like you are surprised. This is UNC. A very aggressive volume recruiter with a history of winning like no other. They are always going to be deep, talented and roll in fresh physical and athletic subs.

They SHOULD be beating teams like Louisville handily 8/10 times.

The only real judgement on teams like this has to be made when facing equals. No being a challenger for the CC every year should be considered a failure

 

The Louisville game was one of the strongest performances I have seen by the Heels in recent years. Their passing game was crisp, fast, and well-executed. And they were rewarded with a fine clutch of goals. But, for one brief moment, the defense was exposed and they paid with a Louisville counter-attack goal. It was so well executed that you might just have to say, "well done! congratulations." But it also exposed a vulnerability that in a playoff context and by an even stronger opponent could end the UNC season. I'd hate to see that because this team, it seems to me, is a strong contender for another national title. Is there anything that can be learned in this otherwise stellar performance and are there any reasonable steps that might be take that could up their chances?

If we breakdown that counter-attack, the UNC vulnerability becomes clear. The play began with Fox about 10 yards on the defensive side of the midfield and 5-10 years from the sideline. Her pass was miss-handled by a UNC flanker at midfield, on the sideline and intercepted by a Louisville player 3-4 yards further down, also on the sideline. From that point to the score, only about 5-6 seconds elapsed. The Louisville player sent a perfect 20 yard or so pass to a feet of a L. forward, in line with Fox and about 10 yards toward the center of the pitch. Let's stop and line up all the relevant players: Otto was also in line and approx. in the center, W-M was on the same center line and about 15 yards closer to goal, Bingman had moved to her left and was 10 yards in front of thee Louisville forward with the ball but nowhere near the center line, and the second Louisville forward was 5 yards or so to W-M's right and abut 3-4 yards further from goal. (Ashley was, I believe, at midfield on the far side and not involved in the play at all.) Picking up the action, the Louisville player that had received the first pass, turned and quickly sent a diagonal pass, with pace, between Otto and W-M. Both W-M and the other Louisville forward turned toward goal and began a sprint to catch up with the pass, At that point W-M was a couple of steps closer t goal, but by the time the ball got to the top of the box, the L.forward had overtaken W-M and was a pace ahead; she controlled the ball and a couple of steps inside the box, hit a perfect shot near post into the goal. There was no error on W-M's part - she was left as the lone defender against a fast forward receiving a perfect diagonal pass.

What could have been different? Anson could have somehow come up with faster center backs, but he has always "played the odds" and he has gone for skilled, field aware CBs no doubt realizing that foot speed is going to cost him a couple of goals over the season. But he did make one very important adjustment to address a different CB problem - turnovers near the back early in the season. Those seemed to result from careless square passes when moving the ball our of the back. The move of Otto from the front to DMF was, it seemed to me, was a brilliant move. Her speed addressed in part the foot speed issue, and her technical defensive skills have been really important, but perhaps most important has been her positioning of herself on offense so that she became a third option for a pass from the back straight up the middle in such a way that she was much more clearly in in the line of sight of a CB or GK than was the case with the backs trying to make a pass to the side.

Another move that might have made a difference in this counter attack and perhaps future through ball efforts would be to pair a second DMF with Otto, perhaps with one of them playing a little advanced of the other. Such a "double pivot" would also open additional offensive options up the middle, but might also provide a good deal more coverage against through balls, such as the one described here.

But, how would that effect the overall strategy and structure of the team? There has been confusion in my mind all season as to whether they are playing a 4-2-3-1 or a 4-3-3. I know the arguments against putting much emphasis on the underlying alignment given their dynamic play, but there could be some benefits by making the structure more fundamental. The back line is clearly a 4-player unit with two advanced wingers - Fox and Ashley - that is working great. The forwards could be viewed as either a 3- or 4-player unit. There is one advanced forward and 3 attacking midfielders, aligned such that the outside flankers are the other 2 in a 3-player unit in a 4-3-3- or a 4-player unit in a 4-2-3-1 alignment. If we look at a 3-player midfield unit for a 4-3-3,it is a pretty incoherent group - Otto firmly anchoring the back, Jones up top but dropping back in some defensive situations, and Bailey roaming freely up top. What I would love to see is Bailey inserted as a second DMF in combination with Otto and the formation to commit to a 4-2-3-1 alignment. That change might not have stopped the Lousiville counter, but it would likely have not left W-M isolated and alone against the forward. UNC is loaded at forward and both Fox and Ashley often end up there on their overlapping runs up the side. Gaining an extra goal from overload at the top, in many situations, might not balance out against giving up a loan goal from a weakness at the center of the back defense. And it would make the 4 forwards a much more coherent unit.

Like I said, Anson/Dino will play the odds, but the odds may may shift as we get to crunch time - in the tournament, preventing a defensive goal may weight more than gaining an offensive goal. A double pivot with such strong players as Otto and Bailey and with all the fire power we have at forward would seem like a good bet!

 

A 2-1 win for the Heels at Notre Dame last night. Shots on goal were 6-4 for ND, but saves by Dickey and Leshnak saved the day. Goals by Russo (header) and Otto (...great run to follow up a shot which rebounded to her.) It looked like Fox was playing brilliantly running out of the back for great crosses out of the corner.

But is Wubben-Moy sick or injured?? Morgan Goff played 90 minutes and is listed as a defender (along with Fox, Ashley, and Bingham. I can interpret the disparity on SOG as Lotte's absence as she organizes the defense well. On the other hand we had speed in the back as Morgan may be the fastest on the team.

Does anyone have answers about Lotte?

 

She was not shown as a sub on the roster. Did she even make the trip?

 

I was at the game last night. I've been to countless UNC/ND games for over 23 years both in South Bend and Chapel Hill and I've never seen a goal scored in less than 30 seconds by either team on each other. I was worried that the game would get out of hand in favor of UNC but ND settled down and scored and actually had several nice chances.

As I see it right now, both have solid teams but def. not the teams of the days of Cindy Parlow/Shannon Boxx, Tobin Heath/Kerri Hanks, Crystal Dunn/Melissa Henderson, etc., etc., and who knows if they ever will be again.

 

Hi MRAD,
Great to hear your voice again on these pages! Yes, I too pine for the old days when there was such a great friendly rivalry between UNC and Notre Dame, but is that just due to our ages?

I have specific memories ... like the ND victory when ND caught UNC off guard on a free kick while UNC was setting up the wall and generally getting organized ND took a quick kick for the score and a victory! (Good planning and execution.) And (was it four years ago when my wife and I attended the game at South Bend?) when the Heels were down by 2(?) and came back to win it and the ND fans were very gracious. And the time down at Chapel Hill when ND was going for their (was it the fourth?) victory over the Tar Heels and was ahead near the end of the game and Randy decided to play some upperclass players who rarely got into games to have the experience of a win at UNC and for some reason the ball stopped going out of bounds and they waited and waited at the scorer's table. Then Anson got up and signaled one of the UNC players to kick it out of bounds so that the ND players could get in. That made everyone feel good.

Yes...... the good old days.

 

Scarpa is coming back from an meniscus tear last fall, then an ACL, and then hip surgery in the late spring. She slowly is getting increasing minutes this season, although, to answer your question, she is also behind some excellent talent. This last sentence also applies to Kingman. The Heels do have some talent. Anson hasn't been able to get the very top names each year as they now routinely go to the west coast to college (Stanford, UCLA, USC, etc,) but he gets a few top ten picks every other year and others that develop nicely. 2017 and 2018 were good years, and 2019 is a large group of local North Carolina kids plus some other under the radar types from out of state.

 

Anson hasn't been able to get the very top names each year as they now routinely go to the west coast to college ...

And why do you think this is ?

 

UNC still has great recruiting classes every year. They may not be Stanford great, but they are not far behind, at all. More specifically, I think a very high percentage of the true blue-chip prospects every year are from California--and given that there are three powerhouse college programs in California--plus a handful of other strong programs on the west coast (Cal, Santa Clara, others)--why wouldn't a very talented California kid just stay in the West? It seems the vast majority do: about 90 percent of the players on the Stanford, USC and UCLA rosters are from California. Beyond that, I think recruiting on the east side of the Mississippi is probably a lot more competitive than it was 10 or 15 years ago--more good programs, more good players. You've got five or six very good programs in the ACC alone, plus Pa. State and SEC and Big10 schools, too. Heck, I just saw that three U17 NT players have committed to Harvard--so academic reputation is a factor as well and certainly helps Stanford. (It doesn't hurt UNC or other ACC schools, most of whom also have very good academic reps, except may be Clemson(!). Even so, I'd bet that every coach in the east would happily take UNC's class every year. The Heels are loaded with talented players.

 

Note: Having finished this piece, I see that L'Orange has basically made the same case, except more succinctly! But I'll share this anyway.

OK. Below follows my take on your good question. Sorry for the length. Enjoy!

It's nothing magic, bad, or good. It's just the way collegiate soccer has developed over the last decades. There are parallels to NCAA football, basketball, and other college sports. The early adopters always get out to a head start with a smaller pool of players and then parity slowly occurs as the total numbers of better coached athletes increases and more colleges take up the sport. Combine these facts with shifting popularity of different colleges in regions where the sport is growing at the grass roots.

Think of the early dominance in college football at the beginning of the 20th century when professionally coached college teams first took over from true amateur student run clubs. In 1900 Fielding Yost took over at Michigan and had a 26-year run at an .833 clip which would have been even better if another midwestern coach (one Knute Rockne, of whom you may have heard) hadn't eclipsed that record by pioneering the concept of national recruiting to Notre Dame in the late teens and 1920s. Other than the Ivy League playing a gentler and uppercrust game of football, the center of college football was the mid west, but that all changed with the popularity of the sport (in large part because of Rockne's promotion of it) made inroads into the south and eventually spread west. Presently, the center of the sport is in the southeast (think Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Georgia, etc. where southern African Americans have in recent decades brought their culture to what once was a white only college sport, and with migrations of African Americans and their football culture up into the midwest and later to southern California we now have strong teams in those areas too. But the center is now the southeast with Alabama dominating and Notre Dame, once an early dynasty, now even with all of the prestige, money, and fan support you could imagine, has been removed from the very top of the football heap.

A similar story could be told about college basketball, where the early college adopters got off to a dominant start and as the sport gained popularity and penetrated in to American culture (more generally than as a YMCA sport.) The early adopters became less conspicuous and other schools became the top recruiting destinations. -Think of the progression from: Phog Allen (Kansas) and Adolph Rupp (Kentucky) who for 30 years seemed to have a lock on seriously winning competitive college ball. And then to John Wooden and Dean Smith (both from the mid west) who embraced wholesale racial integeration of college teams (but with a tip of the hat to Phog Allen who was Smith's mentor for recruiting Wilt Chamberlain) to what college basketball is today -- probably with the most evenly balanced parity of any large scale sport other than controlled by a draft.

Soccer in America at the time was basically a northeast sport with immigrant centered semi-pro and amateur teams (usually sponsored by local employing businesses) from industrial areas of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland/DC (and add in Chicago, St Louis, and then the Dallas area as other immigrant soccer hot spots.) In the 1950s and 1960s, the west coast was basically off the soccer radar map with organized amateur soccer only in its very nascent stages in Southern California. College soccer (even for men) was universally pure amateur with true club teams and no scholarships and little direct recruiting (mostly word of mouth between players who wanted to continue playing together after high school.) And hardly any women played soccer at all.

In the mid 1960s, some colleges began offering men soccer scholarships, but it took until the early 1970s to where the college soccer teams from the Ivy League and the better soccer playing small colleges (eg Haverford and West Chester in the Philadelphia area, or Quincy and Earlham in the midwest) could no longer count on beating the clubs from even the big schools (such as Princeton and Penn or St Louis University and Indiana University, respectively.) By the mid to late 1970s some girls in decent numbers just were beginning to take up soccer. (There were always a few immigrant teams in the Northeast hotspots but these were generally older women in their 20s and 30s.)

And so back to women's college soccer and UNC. Anson was a walk-on non scholarship player at UNC who graduated in 1974 and was asked to take over coaching of the men's team in that year at age 23. And because of his success with the men's team, 5 years later was asked to also coach the women's varsity team which had been recently established -the first women's varsity soccer team in the Southeast. Anson was thereby became the foremost early adopter of women's college soccer and recruiting for it. (His 5 years of experience in the recruiting-competitive world of men's college soccer led naturally to this.) Amateur clubs were just starting to be formed in the major metro areas of North Carolina and the Southeast, so he had to go outside to recruit players in the soccer hotspots and was/is very successful. (In this way the great recruiter and coach Clive Charles at Portland was similar to Anson, except that Clive thought even more broadly and recruited internationally as well.)

But to answer the question 007 asks, it needs to be clearly seen what has changed in the last several decades. Basically girls and women's soccer has steadily spread from the Northeast generally and hotspots in the midwest/Dallas. One key massive change is the sheer numbers of girls playing soccer in California (and in the front range area of Colorado recently.) Whereas in the 1980s the contribution to top women's college team rosters was very low, California players now dominate. This is out of the sheer numbers playing in the Golden State which now dwarf any other region of the country. Consequently, girls from that part of the country will predominately want to go to college near home in a familiar culture (and so will their parents!) So the top three (Stanford, UCLA, USC) not to mention many other schools (such as great options Cal, Santa Clara, and Pepperdine plus some of the other state schools) have become great magnets for local girls to conveniently play top women's soccer, ...And with that huge talented base of players signed up, make recruiting other top players from across the country to sunny California now much easier than it used to be 20 years ago.

And so like the great dynasties in college football and basketball, player demographics and times change, and the original top destinations for recruiting change too. Such change is not a slam on the recruiting abilities or quality of any program or coach, neither for Notre Dame and the legacy of Knute Rockne, or Kansas, the former home of the incredibly respected Phog Allen, or for UCLA, the school that John Wooden put on the map for basketball, or for UNC soccer and Anson Dorrance. Times change, and these coaches all will remain very respected as the years go by. There is no personal failure here only incredible success.

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I'm searching around looking for information about Lotte Wubben-Moy but it seems everybody is about as clueless as I am? She's active on social media but can't really discern anything beyond A) she went to NYC last week while the team traveled to Notre Dame and B) she's back in UNC this morning while the team is preparing for Syracuse.

The only thing I can logic together is that she's picked up a knock of some sort and she went to NYC to see a specialist. Lotte & UNC are perhaps waiting for the results of an examination / test before they make any kind of announcement.

 

Sorry guys, but I dont agree with your take on recruiting. The only thing that is obvious is Stanfords recruits are far better known than others. are they better ? Im not convinced.

Truth is that today, there are many blue chip recruits who have no desire to play for AD at UNC. They dont want any part of that system. As well as it fit some kids is a badly as it fits others.

The fact that the US YNTs have a huge WC bias leads many pundits to really overrate some WC kids relative to their EC counterparts.

 

The heels are loaded with a certain type of player.

 

I remember that game very well. I was there.

 

90% is a bit of an exaggeration. Actual percentage is 67%. And that's skewed by UCLA's numbers, which are higher because it's a state university. Stanford and USC's percentage of Cali women on the roster is 55%.

 

The Early commitment thing probably actually helps Anson. Think about it, if only juniors were able to commit Stanford and Duke, Notre Dame, UCLA and UC Berkeley could probably offer half scholarships and pick whoever they wanted with only a year and a half before college. Now those schools are gambling those slots to 8th and 9th graders. A player I saw 1-2 years ago for Duke on the field would not be able to be on the field for UNC with this years team neither technically nor physically. Sure enough she was on the girls U15/16 national team. Guessing she never physically developed from when she committed. Anson can take a ton of players and let them "competitive cauldron" to see who pans out. UNC's in state tuition can't be beat and it's one of the cheapest out of state tuitions too. Stanford and Duke would be in the drivers seat if the timing were the same as boys football/basketball. UCLA can get players instate with low tuition even without a scholarship. So in a weird way having an early commitment date benefits UNC since other schools don't/can't wait to see what a player closer to college looks like.

 

I'd add that education is a much bigger component of women's soccer compared to men's basketball or football which is why the only program I can think of that is not a top 40 academic school that has perennial success in women's soccer has out of country recruits. Also, the early commitments in women's soccer has the effect of making scholarship offers (even if fractional) less valuable since so many 9th graders will not pan out in college. (they lose the desire, they never fill out physically, their relative speed/quickness/agility diminishes.) Therefore, low tuition and cheap out of state tuition benefit UNC too. (UCLA's out of state tuition is 20$K more than UNCs).

 

chch:

I am confused as to what you are saying...your logic escapes me.

First, out of state students pay considerable dollars making their home stats resident costs quite attractive. Some comparative facts follow.

(See articles detailing costs of attendance http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/paying-for-uc/tuition-and-cost/index.html https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article206602764.html )

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Full-up costs In-state - - - - - - - - - Out-of State
California State schools - - - - - - - - - $ 35,300 - - - - - - - - - - - - - $ 64,300
UNC- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - $ 23,862 - - - - - - - - - - - - - $ 50,009

Not counting cross country transportation 2 or 3 times per year, it would cost a California resident about $15,000 more to attend UNC. So the soccer scholarship money commitment would make a real difference, (unless, of course, money was no object.)

But what are you saying about early commitments? It is true that almost every D1 college coach is recruiting early. At this time all of the top prospects are committed for 2019, only a few remain for 2020, and about 140 prospects have committed for 2021 with most of the blue chippers signed up. I don't get your logic.

 

Anson has 14 full athletic scholarships work with. He typically carries around 30 players. No out of state students get academic money. Stanford has the same 14 athletic scholarships to work with. They also are a private school with a massive endowment. I have heard that any student whose family makes less than $160,000 p/year qualifies for scholarship money on a "needs basis". What I believe happens is Anson may only have enough money to offer a high profile out-of-state recruit a 70% scholarship while Stanford can use "needs based" funds to offer that same recruit a full scholarship. If this is indeed true, and I am not suggesting that I am 100% accurate, then it is possible that every girl on the Stanford roster has close to a full scholarship. How can you compete with a recruiting disadvantage like this? Stanford can use the 14 athletic scholarships for the wealthier kids and use academic money from the endowment to offer scholarships to the others whose families fall below the $160,000 level.

 

You are very misinformed about how things work at Stanford. It’s a good idea to do some research before start stating things when you’re going off of I am not sure what. My kid went there and you’re quite off. There’s no academic scholarship at Stanford. We make less than 150k but did not qualify for the “endowment” money that you speak of. They don’t just consider what you make, but will check your entire assets. We did qualify for some financial aid but far from full, and they are not able to combine that with any other scholarship unfortunately.