Champion’s State of Mind

Adam Stern
Sports Editor

To be the best, you have to beat the best.

And following a dismal season for VCU’s men’s soccer team in 2009, new head coach Dave Giffard has made his recipe for success crystal clear: Go straight to the source.

The Rams, now under Giffard’s guidance since parting ways with long-tenured head coach Tim O’Sullivan after multiple insufficient seasons, began their campaign by playing exhibitions against both 2009 National Championship finalists: National Champions UVA and then runner-up/this year’s preseason No. 1, Akron.

“You can go play against average to below-average teams and you can get a false sense of where you are and who you are,” Giffard said. “By playing against the best teams I think you get a realistic picture of ‘this is who we are and this is where we are, and these are the things that need to be worked upon.'”

The acclaim of such a star-studded set of games is mitigated to an extent considering they are exhibitions and thus meaningless to the team’s records, yet is still a significant challenge considering the Rams finished 10th out of 12 teams in the CAA last season while winning a meager five games and are picked to finish an improved yet still meager 7th place this year.

“Especially for a new coach, it’s an ambitious task to put yourself up against the two best teams in the country,” said J.R. Eskilson, Goal.com’s reporter for college soccer. “I guess what he’s trying to tell his fans is that VCU is going to be competitive; it’s a positive message.”

This message is one that Giffard hopes will reinvigorate a program that’s less than a decade removed from one of the most dominant eras in CAA soccer history; a three-peat from 2002 through 2004 that culminated in the Rams reaching the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament, a competition that VCU hasn’t returned to since.

The games also afforded the team one of their first opportunities to do something one would assume they had long since done: Play together as a full squad. Though a large contingent of the squad has been training together since spring, the entire team hasn’t been together until August 18, two days before the UVA match and with 18 freshman and sophomores, the young team could be relatively unfamiliar with one another.

Once acquainted, however, the team should be together for the long haul. A resounding 82 percent of the players on the team have two years or more of eligibility remaining, a fact that should sit well with a coach who knows how to build a program from the bottom up; doing so with Akron during his four-year stint at the University that culminated in their trip to the NCAA Finals last season.

“It took four years to work through the process to see the picture we’re going to see on Wednesday,” Said Giffard, referring to Akron’s now finished product. “We have a long way to go to get to that picture in the back of your mind, but I like the pieces that we have and the progress that we’re making.”

Indeed, when speaking about the boldness of the decision to face, arguably, the two best teams in the nation for preseason matches, Giffard seemed almost bullish about the topic.

“You know, normally you don’t play the national champions after two days (of playing together for the first time), wait three more days and play the best team in the country,” Giffard said. “But that’s what we’re doing, and that’s how we’re going to go about it.”