As the snow falls in Eau Claire, the men’s club soccer team heads off towards Tuscaloosa, Ala. to compete in the 12th annual National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association Collegiate Soccer Sport Club Championships held Thursday through Saturday.
The men’s team heads into the tournament with a 6-3-1 record, losing to UW-La Crosse twice and the University of Northern Michigan once.
“(The toughest part of this season was) playing the worst soccer of our season in the two most important games that we had, which were against La Crosse,” senior Scott Roemer said. “We lost the game mentally even before it started.”
The team is in the Midwest Alliance Soccer Conference, a part of the Great Lakes Division. The men play teams such as Michigan Tech University and UW-Oshkosh.
The highlight of the season for senior David Gurda came at the team’s last regular season game against the University of Minnesota.
“The high point was putting everything together against Minnesota,” Gurda said. “They are one of the best teams in the country year after year, and we dominated them the entire first half.”
Coming out of the season this year, the team placed second in its conference, missing first place by only a few points.
“We started off slow and lost some initial ground, but the ball got rolling real fast and we knew that we had to win out if we were going to go anywhere,” Gurda said.
The team will compete in the Men’s Open Division at the NIRSA Nationals, playing teams from across the country.
“The open division gives teams a chance to play in an arena they might not otherwise be able to compete in,” assistant director of National Sports Programs at NIRSA Valerie McCutchan said.
This season, the men have faced challenges as any sports team does. One thing the team strived to overcome was finding the right chemistry, junior Dao Xiong said.
“Our biggest opponents were ourselves,” Xiong said. “As soon as we started to believe in our own ability and each other, we started to dominate against the hardest of rivals.”
As a club team, the men’s soccer team is responsible for all of its funding. Each member of the team pays for fees like getting the field lined and the referee’s wages. In addition to these expenses, traveling, jerseys, coaching and other things are paid for largely through fundraising and people of the community making donations to the team.
“They have single-handedly allowed us to fund our team this year,” Xiong said.
The NIRSA National Tournament Men’s Open Division is a “first-come, first-serve” basis, said McCutchan. The team left late Wednesday afternoon and, since then, has been working hard to be the team in the best physical shape, Roemer said.
“It has been a team effort that has really paid off,” he said. “And hopefully will again when we have to play up to five games in three days at Alabama.”