The women's soccer team has had plenty of success this season living by a new motto: Opponents are "nameless and faceless."
By making sure not to underestimate some of the lighter teams on their non-conference schedule early this year and by trying not to give too much respect to loftier teams like Texas and UCLA, the Blue Devils now head into ACC play with a 7-2-1 record, their best start in three years.
But Duke's conference schedule starts tonight with names it knows too well to ignore, faces too intimidating to forget--those of top-ranked, undefeated North Carolina. Especially after battling to a scoreless tie in Chapel Hill last season, the No. 10 Blue Devils might just have to make their motto moot at Koskinen Stadium come 7 p.m.
"I think we're going to try and stick to that, but we always play well against UNC and even more so this year. We feel like this year is our year," sophomore forward Carolyn Riggs said. "We got the first tie against them in our program's history last year, so yeah, they play well, but you have to throw everything out the window when it comes to the UNC game."
Riggs had Duke's best scoring opportunity in an otherwise relentlessly defensive battle against North Carolina last October, and she and the Blue Devils are looking for many more tonight against a high-flying Tar Heel offense. Duke and UNC lead the ACC in scoring and are the only teams in the conference averaging three or more goals a game. But North Carolina has shut out nine of its eleven opponents--including three in a row--and has scored 38 goals while only allowing an astounding three.
The Blue Devils have also been slow coming out of the gates at times this season, with only two shots in the first half of their Sept. 14 loss to Washington State at the Wake Forest adidas Classic and a 20-minute lapse at the start of their only other loss this year, to UCLA a week later in Duke's adidas tournament. In those same two tournaments, the Tar Heels crushed Washington State, 4-0, tacked on another five goals in upending UCLA, 5-2, but only saw Duke's losses from afar.
"Our goal is not to match their intensity. Our goal is to set just a tone of the game early," Duke head coach Robbie Church said. "In some of the games, we've done that really, really well, and in some of them we haven't done as well as we wanted to. But it's vital tomorrow that we come out and we play from the first minute."
As they normally do before game days, the Blue Devils had a relaxed practice yesterday, preparing for UNC's defensive sets and running through light drills after Church did not grant the team an off day following a two-game weekend. Both teams will come in fresh off weekend sweeps on the road, wins that did not affect North Carolina's undisputed hold on the No. 1 spot in all the soccer polls but that did leave Duke slipping in some.
The Blue Devils dropped this week in the SoccerTimes.com and coaches' rankings while jumping a bit in the Soccer Buzz Magazine and Soccer America polls, leaving them all over the board, from No. 10 to No. 20. "We don't feel like we got the kind of respect that we deserve," Riggs said. "That's disappointing, but that adds fuel to our fire."
Trying to douse that for UNC will be the sophomore duo of midfielder Lori Chalupny and forward Lindsay Tarpley. The two have seven goals each this season, and Chalupny has racked up four game-winning goals alone with her swift, cutting style. Tarpley, though, is the main threat, as she is averaging over five shots per game.
Duke senior goalie Thora Helgadottir is back in Durham after her second trip to play with the Icelandic national team forced her to miss this weekend's action, and she insists that a big test against the Tar Heels is "nothing new at all" for her. Yet for a Blue Devil team whose one and only win against its arch-rival came in 1994, the anticipation this year is as great as ever.
"The whole time you're growing up, you only ever hear about UNC," sophomore defender Kate Seibert said. "It's kind of cool to get the opportunity to beat them because they're the epitome of the best women's soccer team. It kind of gives [us] a chance of [doing] something we've always dreamed about doing."
With Duke fielding arguably its most talented team in years, then, the dream might become reality. Seibert tallied four goals in non-conference play and trails only Riggs and freshman midfielder Lauren Tippets for the team lead. Tippets has been on a roll of late, scoring in the Blue Devils' last four games and putting an exclamation mark on a freshman class that includes three starters and two other major contributors. Church has deemed the freshmen and the rest of his rolling team ready for the rigors of ACC play, no matter what happens in their early test tonight.
"Carolina's the best, and we want to see where we are right now," Church said. "You want to start off well in the ACC, but, win or lose, the sun will come up on Thursday, and [No. 16] Wake Forest will be here Saturday night. So we've got to be ready for that, and we've got to move on, whatever we do with it."
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