The women's soccer team left for College Station, Tx. yesterday at 6 a.m., packed on the last flight they could book after a last minute change in travel plans. The Blue Devils (13-6-1) were expecting to receive home-field advantage for the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament this weekend but will instead travel to the home of Texas A&M, taking on Stephen F. Austin (15-4-2) today at 6 p.m. and potentially moving on to face the winner of the A&M-Southern Methodist game in Sunday's second round.
"It'a new environment, and it's a new experience," senior Gwendolyn Oxenham said. "I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. We haven't had great success on the road, but we're aware of that, and it's kind of a focus for us. We know that Texas A&M had a 24-game home winning streak until Nebraska broke it, so we're aware of the circumstances, and we're ready to prepare for them."
Oxenham also said it was hard to complain after Duke received a No. 12 seed overall in the field of 64, not to mention the fact that the Blue Devils escaped without having been placed in the same bracket as No. 1 North Carolina. The Tar Heels toppled Duke 6-1 last Friday night in the ACC Tournament semifinals, but the Blue Devils have had a week to get over a loss against an anomaly of a team who Duke insists helped, not hurt.
"All of us are getting a little tired of hearing about UNC," sophomore Carolyn Riggs said. "You come up against teams like that, and you just have to move on. We need to focus on the good things."
"We know that we're playing well, and we know that outside of a few teams, we could dominate any of the teams that we could come up against," she said. "And any of the teams that we're looking at coming up in the near future, we're not afraid of them."
Southland Conference champion Stephen F. Austin are not prone to striking fear into too many nationally ranked opponents, as the Jacks, who received an at-large road bid and are not seeded as one of the top 16 teams, have not even faced another team in the tournament yet this season.
"I'm not going out on a big limb saying obviously we have more talent than Stephen F. Austin," head coach Robbie Church said. "But we've all watched NCAA Tournaments and seen the upsets that happen to teams that have looked past and kind of looked to the next round. So I think our girls have done a pretty good job of not looking past them."
If the Blue Devils can get past Stephen F. Austin, though, both Texas A&M (12-5-2) and SMU (17-3-1) propose some legitimate threat. The Aggies received a home bid more because of technicalities than anything else, as UNC pulled most of the south Atlantic coast teams into their bracket and Virginia, which Duke beat last weekend and in the regular season, received a home bid because they pulled in the northern Atlantic region.
But the Blue Devils, home or not, remain undaunted by the 3,600-seat Aggie Soccer Complex, confident that they will be sleeping in their own beds next week, ready to travel to Penn State for third-round action the following weekend.
"I know that Texas A&M has a huge stadium and they get a huge crowd," Riggs said. "And that's great for them, but we have enough positives right now, and we're playing well enough that that's not going to take us out of our game. The NCAA Tournament is important enough that we're not going to let the fact that there are a lot of fans down there be to our disadvantage."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.