Soccer Seniors Strive to Win WAC Championship

The founding members of Rice’s women’s soccer team set goals for themselves when they launched their collegiate careers in 2001. One of those goals was to win the WAC championship, but two years in a row the Owls suffered a defeat to Southern Methodist University and had to settle for second place in the conference.

But for all the disappointments, the team has had just as many triumphs: regional rankings, all-conference selections, new school records that have been set with each season. And this year—on the heals of the Owl’s 2–0 loss to SMU in the November 7 Western Athletic Conference championship game in Hawaii—the team experienced its greatest achievement to date: an invitation to the NCAA Tournament.
The announcement that the Owls had been selected to play in the tournament came just hours after the soccer team returned on a red-eye flight from Honolulu, and it quickly alleviated jet lag and frustration over the SMU loss.

“We saw our name come up on the screen, and the players just started going crazy,” recalls head coach Chris Huston, who was the 2004 WAC coach of the year. The Owls lost to No. 19 ranked University of Illinois, but Huston notes that she’s still proud of the team’s accomplishments.

“It’s exciting that we made it this far because this is our inaugural class of seniors,” Huston explains. “Making the NCAA Tournament was one of our goals. Obviously it didn’t turn out the way we wanted, but it’s exciting for them and well deserved.”

Regardless of the goals they reached and those they didn’t, the seniors on this year’s squad can look back on their collegiate careers with pride. They were groundbreakers: Rice’s first women’s soccer team.

The women are aware that they’ve been trailblazers for Rice women’s athletics. They have been through a lot together, and that is one of the factors that made this year’s team so strong. Heading into the season, the squad was ranked as the No. 12 team in a 68-team region, according to the Internet publication Soccer Buzz, and it was picked to finish third in the conference in a preseason poll of WAC coaches. A total of 19 letter winners, including all 11 starters, returned from the team that went 11–8–1 in 2003. The trio of Caitlin Currie and Sarah Yoder, both seniors, and junior Erin Droeger nabbed honors by being named to the preseason all-Western Athletic Conference team. The team did better than expected this year with its second-place conference finish and improved over the previous season with an overall record of 14–5–3 and 5–2–1 in conference play.

In addition to Currie and Yoder, other founding members of the team are Betsy Huete, Jackie Rellas, Ashley Anderson, Janelle Crowley, Marisa Galvan, Becky MacAllister, and Lauren Shockley. Junior Amanda Garrison, who missed all of the 2003 season with an injury, is another of the original team members.

With only two upperclassmen on the original squad, the girls had little guidance from more experienced teammates. Huete describes being a part of the inaugural program as “overwhelming.” Being self-taught, she recalls, was both a blessing and a curse.

“It was a curse because we didn’t have anyone telling us the way to do things, and we made a lot of mistakes,” she says. “But it was a blessing because of our sense of freedom and leadership that we probably wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.”