Wake Forest Athletics
Stacy Roeck Playing Anywhere and Everywhere
10/9/2000 12:00:00 AM | Women's Soccer
Oct. 9, 2000
By Jay Reddick
When the women's soccer team got back from a road trip to California on Oct. 2, a member of the Deacons' media relations staff who has seen every home game had a question for Stacy Roeck:
"Where'd you play this weekend?"
"Center midfield," she responded.
It was an honest question, and if you ask Roeck where she'll be playing her next game, she may not know. Such is the life of a versatile junior at Wake Forest.
Roeck spent all of last season as the Deacons' starter at sweeper, earning second-team All-ACC honors there. But she also showed a nose for the ball, scoring four goals on only 17 shots. So when the team came back this fall to begin preseason practice, coach Tony da Luz decided to try Roeck at forward. That worked well for the offense, but the defense suffered, so back she went. And so on.
Through the first 11 games of the season, Roeck has started in front, in the back and, in California, in the midfield. She has switched from defender to forward at halftime when the team needed an offensive boost. She hasn't played goalie...yet.
Through it all, though, she's remained a positive contributor to the Deacs' start. Her five goals are second on the team, and her three assists are tied for the team lead. And as long as she's on the field, she doesn't care where it is, she'll handle it.
"It's made the game more complex, and I enjoy it," Roeck said. "Last year I played sweeper the whole year. I knew this year I'd move up a little and get involved in the offense. I never get any breaks during the game. I always have to be on my toes. It's fun."
Roeck has always been one to help out wherever she's needed. She learned all about soccer at a very young age from her brother Brent, now 26, who played youth soccer in and around San Diego, Calif., when Roeck was just a baby.
"My earliest memory is going to his games when I was a little kid, messing around with the other little kids," Roeck said. "He played sports all through high school, so I always got dragged along. It was either do that or do nothing."
So she played, concentrating on soccer when she was a youth, and picking up tennis around the age of 12. Quickly, she became at least as good at tennis as she had been at soccer, in high school, she was ranked among the nation's top 80 players in her age group.
But when the recruiting process started during her senior year, she made the choice: she would play soccer in college.
"I enjoyed tennis, and I would always travel with tennis before I would travel with soccer back then," Roeck said. "But soccer is my first love. I enjoy the team aspects of it."
She chose Wake Forest, she says, for two reasons: she always wanted to go to school on the East Coast, and the Deacons, with da Luz (a former San Diego player and coach) and players she "got along with so well," felt like a little slice of home.
She hasn't regretted it at all, with two trips to the NCAA tournament the last two seasons and what Roeck calls "unbelievable talent" on this year's squad.
When Roeck's not playing or practicing soccer, she's usually concentrating on her studies. A health and exercise science major, she wants to work with children in some capacity after she graduates.
"I'm planning on being a speech pathologist, so I'm volunteering at an elementary school doing that right now," Roeck said. "I've worked at a lot of children's camps over the years, and I love to see how much joy they get out of life. I don't know if I'll stay in speech pathology, but I definitely want to work with kids."
Any free time she has beyond that is usually spent on sports, one way or another. Her will to win, she says, sometimes extends beyond the playing field to the television set.
"I think that's ingrained in me," Roeck said. "I'm a competitive person, and sports are a great way to get that out. That's my passion. I watch all sports, and I think I've played every sport except the water sports and the snow sports. During the Olympics, I couldn't get enough of watching everything."
Her competitive fire and the leadership she has developed give her a unique perspective onm this year's Deacons. Roeck said this year's team, off to a 5-4-1 start, hasn't lived up to its potential yet, but she figures it's right around the corner.
"We couldn't get into a rhythm together to start the year, but I think we're starting to," Roeck said. "I think we've put some of our bad games behind us. We've started out some games not intense at all. We need to get more focused. I think we'll really come out intense and show how well we match up in the ACC."
