Although they struggled and fought their way through a sometimes-torturous regular season, the players on the No. 3 ASU men's soccer team now have their bags packed for the University of Alabama and the 2003 National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association national tournament.
Never before in men's club team history has ASU been ranked as high as men's soccer currently is. And with the return of senior midfielder Noah Lewkowitz from an ankle injury, hopes are high heading into the team's first game this morning.
"I think we're comparable to a mid- to low-level Division I team," freshman goalkeeper Brad Carbaugh said.
In first-round pool-play, the Sun Devils (8-5-3) will take on Cornell (11-1-4) at 8 a.m. and Minnesota (13-1-1) at 2 p.m.
Simply the fact that ASU has become a post season threat is impressive, especially when the team began the 2003 season with a 1-4-2 record.
"We started off horribly," Carbaugh said. "We sucked. We lost five guys due to injury, including our top player, so we took the first three or four weeks of the season to become a team."
The early injury to Lewkowitz stripped more than just a scoring threat from the Sun Devils' lineup. A native of Paradise Valley, Lewkowitz played three years at Duke before a knee injury knocked him out of NCAA soccer. Now a grad student at ASU, Lewkowitz offers experience and depth to a Sun Devil team that is desperately looking to make a statement to all ASU and Pac-10 administrators that there should be men's NCAA soccer in Tempe.
On the field early in the season, any playoff hopes looked bleak until a weekend trip to San Diego sparked life in ASU. After a 4-0 thumping at the hand of San Diego State, the Sun Devils regrouped and, almost in an instant, turned their season around with a 1-0 win over the University of San Diego.
"SDSU was ranked No. 1 in the region, and they really put a whooping on us," sophomore defender Jeff Friedman said. "The next day we pulled out a gritty win over USD."
Since the rough start, the Sun Devils went on a tear, outscoring opponents 30-10 during a stretch where they went 7-1-1. Their lone loss was a hard-fought match against UA in the Region 6 title game, in which ASU fell 2-1. All hopes are that the Sun Devils and Wildcats will meet one more time this season - in the NIRSA Championship.
"We'd love to see them again," Carbaugh said. "It will be interesting to see how we size up against other teams."
Reach the reporter at damien.tippett@asu.edu.
