With the Mississippi State women’s soccer team finishing 2-16 on the season, there is a team that goes nearly unnoticed by the MSU student body that brought glory to the Maroon and White on the soccer field this year.
As part of the National Intramural Recreational Sports Association, the MSU men’s club soccer team finished the year with an impressive 10-2-1 record, standing undefeated against all SEC teams they played.
Despite having no coach, little funding and no professional athletic training, the team has received an at-large bid into the national 24-team tournament, hosted this year at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz.
The tournament will be held Nov. 16-18.
The team’s president and starting goalie, senior history major Joe Macias, says that the team is honored to have received a bid to play in the national tournament but that traveling to Tempe will be a challenge.
He said the team lacks about $7,000 of the neccesary $10,000 needed for the trip.
“It’s hard for us to get noticed because we didn’t have too many home games this year,” Macias said. “We’ve been working hard all year, and just to get a little recognition for our efforts is what we want. We’ve had practice every week since the first full week of school. A lot of times, we have to pay for stuff out of our own pockets, and it gets really frustrating not getting noticed.”
The team only played three games at home and won each of them against Ole Miss, Delta State and Alabama.
Macias said that the team carpooled to all of the road games.
MSU also defeated Auburn, Georgia, Kentucky, LSU, Southern Polytechnic, Southeast Louisiana and Samford during the season. They also tied Florida.
The only two losses the team suffered were against Clemson and North Carolina, one of which came in the southeastern regional tournament in Tupelo, forcing MSU to hope for an at-large bid to the NIRSA tournament.
Macias said that the team didn’t think they would receive a bid because they heard the news so late, but the phone call from the regional coordinator was greatly appreciated and celebrated.
Macias said being president of the club takes up more time than his classes and can be extremely stressful at the beginning of the year when he’s trying to schedule games with other clubs.
The team competes in a southeastern region composed of club teams ranging from Kentucky southward and from Mississippi eastward.
Macias says the team is more of a defensive team and allowed less than one goal per game on the year.
Sophomore civil engineering major Eric Cranford and junior forestry major Nicols Torrence were the team’s scoring leaders, Macias said.
The trip to Tempe will be the fourth time in school history that the club team has made the national tournament. The team made nationals in Macias’s freshman season.
The team’s success isn’t attributed to one particular aspect but rather a combination of the team’s chemistry, work ethic, individual player skill and a little luck, Macias said.
He added that the team doesn’t want to be mistaken as a club that is begging Mississippi State to begin a men’s varsity soccer team.
“I don’t think our goal when the club team was formed was to ask the university to get a varsity men’s soccer team,” Macias said. “It’d be nice to see us get one and to see some quality soccer from Mississippi State. We’ve got the players, and I’m sure if there was money there, they could get a lot more players here.”
Macias adds that because of the team’s success, it would be nice to be appreciated around campus and by the student body.
“Sometimes, it feels like we don’t exist to the university,” Macias said. “Nobody knows who we are, and it’s just like we’re the chess club or something.
“We’re an athletic team; we’ve played other schools and beaten a lot of good opponents. It’s just nice to be noticed by the student body.”