Your future, our focus
BY RANDAL HOROBIK
Tribune Sports Editor
Intercollegiate soccer made its debut for Northwest College this past weekend. By all accounts, the coming-out party has to be considered a rousing success. In their first four games — two men’s, two women’s — Northwest College returned home from a lengthy road trip with a combined 2-1-1 record.
Had it not been for some, shall we say, unique timekeeping — I invite anyone to provide me with another example from major soccer where a half is blown dead on a clear attacking opportunity — that mark could easily have been 2-0-2, if not 3-0-1.
Regardless of which record you look at, the results are noteworthy given the fact that neither program existed on anything but a conceptual level just nine months earlier. Sure, soccer had existed as a club sport on the NWC campus. But moving from a club level to a competitive intercollegiate activity is no easier in soccer than one would expect the dorm intramural basketball league champions to step up and compete in Region IX.
And that’s the key word in this discussion — compete.
Given the compressed time frame it had to operate with, Northwest College’s inaugural season could have been rife with difficulties. Considering the programs were starting behind the curve with regard to both visibility and recruiting, it didn’t take a lot of imagination to envision NWC’s first season of intercollegiate soccer being largely a throw-away affair where student-athletes were playing to keep their scholarships for the following year and the schedule consisted of lump after lump.
Clearly, that’s not going to be the case.
The Trappers demonstrated in the season’s opening weekend that they are capable of competing on the pitch — not someplace down the road, but right here, right now. Admittedly, nobody is going to mistake Dodge City for seven-time national champion Yavapai, but the school does play in the Jayhawk Conference, arguably the most consistently strong league in the country when it comes to across-the-board junior college athletic quality. That Cisco College squad that the Trapper women played to a scoreless draw? They’ve won multiple Region V titles and had walked off the field victorious in 113 of their last 150 games.
Most established programs would gladly take the draw and walk off the pitch with a smile on their faces against that resumé. As a first-year program, one has to imagine the NWC visages were positively beaming with excitement.
Like many, perhaps even those in NWC uniforms, I don’t have a large frame of reference when it come to junior college soccer. In fact, today’s (Thursday) men’s contest against Laramie County will be the first I’ve covered in my career.
We’ll have a better idea one week from now about how both the men’s and women’s teams stack up against their Region IX counterparts. Based on early indications, however, the Trappers have every reason to suspect that they can be in the mix immediately in Year 1.
If you’ve got the opportunity to get out of work an hour early Thursday, or if you find yourself looking for a good excuse to get out of the house or dorm to enjoy what should be a seasonable late summer or early fall day, I invite you to head over to the field at Trapper West — NWC’s new soccer fields weren’t as ready as its teams for the inaugural contest — for today’s home and Region IX opener at 4 p.m. Help welcome Northwest College’s newest sport to town and provide the team with a positive atmosphere for its first-ever home game.
The soccer era at Northwest College dawned this past weekend. From early indications, plenty of bright spots lie ahead on the horizon.