Men's Soccer Season Recap

It was a season full of near misses for the Harvard men’s soccer team. The team lost seven times by one goal and only once by more than two.

Take out the 6-0 clubbing by then-No. 6 UConn, and the team only posted a -9 goal differential on the season. After a loss to Brown dropped the team to 1-7-3—the team’s fifth overtime match without a win to show for it—junior defender Ross Friedman noted that the team’s record didn’t reflect how good it was.

“It’s tough to talk about our record…but I don’t think it speaks to how good we are as a team,” Friedman said. “I think we played one of the toughest schedules in the country. We played every big-time team on the East Coast and two big-time teams on the West Coast. We’re a good team, but it’s just tough when we’re not getting the results [to back that up].”

Co-captain Scott Prozeller expressed similar frustrations after the team was shut out for the fifth time, 1-0, in a Senior Day loss to Columbia.

“I don’t think we were outplayed or outclassed, I just don’t think we came out [to play] in the first half,” Prozeller said after the game. “I think we just need to focus on putting a full 90 minutes together. I don’t think that is something we’ve been able to do all year, really executing top-to-bottom for an entire game.”

In the Ancient Eight—where the team finished in last place, a half-game behind the Yale Bulldogs—the main struggle was scoring goals. The team tied for sixth in the league with five goals in eight games and never scored more than one goal against an Ivy League opponent.

“Scoring goals is the toughest thing to do in soccer. I can speculate all over the place about why we weren’t able to [score], but I think the biggest reason is that we lacked an offensive system that would stay consistent from game to game,” junior midfielder Kevin Harrington said. “We would sit back and win the ball in our own half, but we were getting caught in possession and having to blast the ball forward without a real system or strategy.”

The team began the season with only one loss in its first three matches, tying UMass, 1-1, in the season opener and then scoring a 1-0 victory over Michigan State a week later. The inspired play of freshmen against the Spartans—goalkeepers Evan Mendez and Joe Festa shut out Michigan State, while forward Jake Freeman put in the contest’s lone goal—was, according to Harrington, representative of one of the season’s bright spots: the play of the rookie class.

“It was a lot to ask of young guys [to come] in to play so many minutes,” Harrington said. “They really stepped it up and were some of the more dedicated and consistent players on the team. I personally couldn’t have asked more from them. We are fortunate to have gotten such responsible and skilled players who are going to be huge parts of our team next year and going forward.”

The team lost four games in a row after the win against the Spartans, including the 6-0 loss to UConn that represented the low point of the season. the Huskies came in ranked in the top five nationally and dealt the Crimson its worst loss of the year.

The team’s season was a series of peaks and valleys from then on. Both non-conference wins—BU and Holy Cross—were sandwiched by a pair of conference losses. Despite this, after a season-ending loss to Penn—Harvard’s sixth consecutive in the Ivy League—co-captain Richard Smith was optimistic about the future.

“Last year the team was in pretty bad shape,” Smith said then. “Even though the results aren’t that much better, the improvements have been there, in terms of commitment to the team and to the system.”

After a season that seemed to pose more questions than answers, Harrington said that the offseason, which saw the resignation of coach Carl Junot and the hire of former California associate head coach Pieter Lehrer to lead the team, is part of a necessary change that the Crimson hopes to make. Every member of the 2009 Ivy League-winning squad is now gone from the roster, and the team will begin 2013 with a clean slate.

“I think we’re going through a transition period with the new coach coming in for next season,” Harrington said. “This season obviously didn’t go as we planned, but we learned a lot these past three years that will make us more successful going into the next season.”

—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at davidfreed@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @CrimsonDPFreed.

—Staff writer Hope Schwartz can be reached hschwartz@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @HopeSchwartz16.