It has been a difficult season for Oregon women’s soccer and many of its issues may be a result of the young roster.
The Ducks are dealing with a full-scale rebuild. After the 2022 season, 10 players graduated. This season there are 15 freshmen, 10 of them being true freshmen and five redshirts. There are no seniors on the roster and only one fifth-year player. Oregon is the fourth youngest team in the nation and the second youngest among Power Five schools.
The team has so many new faces on the roster who are inexperienced and lack chemistry playing alongside other Oregon players. This was obvious in their non-conference slate in which they went 0-6-2 and scored only three goals in eight games.
Head coach Graeme Abel told the media that he believes the team is close to finding success but they “just haven’t put it all together yet.” He said that communication between the coaching staff and players is especially important with a young team.
“It’s not been consistent mistakes that have hurt us. It’s been a mistake here that we were maybe a little bit naive with in regards to this piece or we need to do a better job as a coaching staff to coach that piece. We get that piece taken care of okay, and then something else,” Abel said in the middle of a four-game losing streak earlier in the season. “It’s not been the same thing consistently happening. So it’s lessons we take in. It’s lessons we continue to teach as coaches and so we’re hoping that as we continue along here, those get less and less.”
The Ducks immediately improved when Abel took over as head coach in December 2019. In 2020 and 2021, Oregon posted its first consecutive winning seasons in 40 years with him in charge. In 2021, the team had its best record since 2006 and barely missed out on a spot in the NCAA Tournament.
Last season, however, the Ducks finished with a 4-8-7 record. Oregon regularly faces programs such as UCLA, which won the National Championship in 2022, and Stanford, which always rosters future United States National team players. Injuries within the Ducks’ squad made it difficult to find success in a strong Pac-12 conference. The results of the 2022 season greatly impacted how the team recruited ahead of 2023.
“I always reference back to the ‘21 season. We really got kind of the program over moving in the right direction,” Abel said. “We had patience up top and that was the thing that was able to hurt teams. And so we recruited that. We went after that piece and we looked at that, so I think being able to press the teams up the field and being aggressive, that’s what we gotta get back to.”
Abel called this team “the most athletic group” that Oregon has had. It’s evident through the positive stretches of games that the Ducks have a decent amount of young talent. The problem is that Oregon may have added too many new faces, which has led to the lack of results.
With over half of the team being freshmen, sophomores and juniors have had to step into leadership roles. Players like Alice Barbieri and Anna Phillips, who have now been with the program for a couple of years, have embraced the new players. They’ve taken on the job of not only cleaning up their own mistakes but also guiding the freshmen.
“I’ve taken it upon myself and so have a few of the other girls to really try and teach the freshmen how we play soccer around here. I think it shows because the freshmen are doing so well and they’ve picked it up like no other super quickly,” Barbieri said at a press conference earlier this season. “So we’re really proud of them and what they’ve done in the time that they’re putting in off by themselves watching film. It’s awesome to see.”
Several of the veteran players and Abel spoke about how impressed they were by the freshmen early in the season. The newcomers are aware of what film they need to study between games and how to bring more energy to the roster. They also don’t shy away from asking questions, whether it has to do with soccer or not.
Both Barbieri and Jordan Snyder, the only fifth-year player, expressed how they want to be someone players can come to if they’re dealing with something off the field. A lot of the team is new to not just college soccer, but college life in general. Balancing their sport with classes and their social lives may be a struggle for some of the players, on top of being away from home for the first time. The veterans have been in that position before and are ready to put their arms around the new players.
“Because there’s so many underclassmen, we kind of have to give advice because they haven’t been in college before,” Snyder said to the media. “So we just give them advice, not even about soccer, just communicating with each other. If you have a little disagreement, it’s finding ways to communicate even just outside of soccer.”
The veterans also benefit from freshmen. Depth, especially among the frontline, is something that the team needed after the injuries it went through in 2022. This season Abel can rotate his squad more which will give other players the opportunity to rest. Barbieri said that it will give her and her teammates fresher legs when they’re on the field.
“I think we have so much depth in every position which isn’t something that we’ve had since I’ve been here,” Barbieri said. “It definitely allows for rotation and we have so many different girls with so many different assets that it allows us to rotate it based on something that we need on the field.”
The silver lining for Oregon is that it won’t have 10 seniors graduating following the conclusion of the season. Only Snyder is expected to exit the squad, as well as any players who decide to enter the transfer portal. The team will be full of players who have several years of eligibility left and will have had experience playing with one another.
The 2023 season might not end up looking like a successful season for the Ducks in the standings. However, the valuable experience the young players will gain may still prove to be instrumental for steering the future of the program in the right direction.
Are you curious about how this article was written? Check out this week’s “How It’s Reported” with Lily Crane.
