Wake Forest Athletics
Deacon Sports Xtra: Demon Deacons Took Advantage of Unique Spring Season
6/21/2021 2:19:00 PM | Men's Soccer, Les Johns
In a once-in-a-lifetime season, Wake Forest men’s soccer’s young squad in the team found a way to advance to the Elite Eight and was named Male Team of the Year.
Despite substantial mid-season losses to the professional ranks, an ill-timed round of Covid protocols and injuries abound, Wake Forest men's soccer went through the entire spring regular season without a loss and made a run to the NCAA Elite Eight — just one win away from a second-straight trip to the College Cup.
They were named the Wake Forest Men's Team of the Year in the 2021 Virtual Black & Golden Globes.
"I'm appreciative of any win," said Wake Forest head coach Bobby Muuss. "Before we move on to the new, we do have to celebrate the last year. When you get to this level, unfortunately only one team wins. Only one team is going to be happy when you play at an elite level of collegiate or professional athletics.
"We lost in the quarterfinal and believe we should have made the College Cup. We had an opportunity, but at the same time only one team is really happy once you get that far. So we have to look back at what we accomplished. No team in Wake Forest soccer history has been through this sort of adversity, when you factor Covid hitting the team in the postseason and guys leaving for the professional ranks."
Covid impacted the team right as the ACC Tournament started in mid-November, and the top-five ranked Demon Deacons, entering as one of the favorites with a 7-1-0 record, dropped a 2-0 decision to Virginia. Multiple key players for Muuss were at a hotel isolated because of Covid-19 and contact tracing protocols.
Then, when the squad got back together in the spring, the roster was truncated because players like Machop Chol, Calvin Harris, Andrew Panneberg and Isaiah Parente had earned professional contracts. A normal college soccer season climaxes late in the fall with the College Cup, but the NCAA shuffled the deck and split the season over both semesters because of the pandemic.
When Muuss got the team back together in late January, an epiphany stuck him while waiting for his coffee at Starbucks.
"There's only 36 teams getting into the NCAA Tournament," he realized. "That is 12 less than normal. There's only 12 at-large bids. Wow, we might not make the NCAA Tournament.
Most years, the Atlantic Coast Conference gets between 8-10 entries in the NCAA Tournament.
"No way that's happening," Muuss said. "Maybe half of that, if we're lucky (five actually were included this year).
"We haven't gone over .500 in the spring in forever, because we just focus on getting better and we've normally lost guys. You want to win games, but it's more about development. I was nervous for a long time. Once we got the first couple wins, I started to think we might be ok."
The Demon Deacons finished 4-0-2 during the spring regular season, including a 0-0 double-overtime finish against then No. 1 Clemson.
"Did we not lose the entire spring until the end?" Muuss questioned when asked about going undefeated in the spring. "Did we? I didn't realize until just now. We'll take that all day.
"We just kept fighting and fighting and fighting, which you have to commend. Maybe we were just slightly better than the competition, and if you're just slightly better, then the attention to detail has to be awesome. As we went on, the group enjoyed each other more. We enjoyed training."
With the Wake Forest soccer program, training is quite often more arduous and challenging than the games, and a ramping up of intensity with the young group left behind in the spring was crucial toward their development.
"We just kept the energy up in training," said Wake Forest Male Freshman of the Year Garrison Tubbs. "Our training is always high intensity, just trying to get better every single day. We just had that next man up mentality. Guys were gone, spots were open and new guys just had to elevate their game. If you have that mentality and training every day, you're bound to get better. That helped us keep everything together after losing all those older guys."
At least partially-affectionately dubbed the "Baby Deacs" by Muuss because of their youth and inexperience, ranked wins over Coastal Carolina and Kentucky got Wake Forest right on the cusp of another College Cup. Though they gained a ton of experience in the spring, Muuss cautions that they will just be a few months older when the fall campaign begins, not an entire year as is the norm.
"This team isn't getting that much older from May to July when they get back," he said. "We're still going to be young and inconsistent, and make some mistakes. We're just pouncing upon the consistency with these guys, the way they play and the way they train. When we're playing at a high level, we can be very good. But when we see that model of inconsistency that we saw in the spring, in the ACC it's going to come back on you and you're going to pay the price.
"These young kids have never played a real college soccer season. So they don't know what it's like to play Tuesday-Friday, Tuesday-Friday and then Monday-Saturday. They don't know what that schedule is like. If you're inconsistent on Tuesday, get in a war and drop a game, the mental and physical fatigue you faced then is going to bite you in the butt on Friday. They need to be focused and we need to be more consistent individually and collectively."
Though their achievements last season were significant considering the challenges they faced, Muuss is completely focused now on the campaign ahead.
Right now I'm working as hard as I possibly can to win games in 2021," he said. "You don't have time to reflect. You have to celebrate it. We still have to enjoy winning more than we do, and not just take it for granted. We have to celebrate what they persevered and accomplished. Yeah, we'd like to flip a goal here or there. It would have been great to go to back-to-back College Cups with a young team.
"But we need to celebrate. We enjoyed the ride. Now if you don't get back again, folks are going to question it."
