With a 1-0 loss to the University of Connecticut in the second round of the NCAA tournament Nov. 18, the men’s soccer season came to an end. They reached the tournament after clinching the Colonial Athletic Association Championship with a 1-0 win over Hofstra University in double overtime on Nov. 11, and advanced to the second round after topping Boston College 1-0 at Parsons Field on Nov. 15 to push their unbeaten home streak to 16 games. While at the CAA Championships, head coach Brian Ainscough was named CAA Coach of the Year. The News caught up with him to talk about the season.
Huntington News: Your team had a historic season. If you could sum it all up in one word, what would it be?
Brian Ainscough: Fabulous.
HN: You guys set some impressive records this season, including the most wins in a season. Did you expect to have that much success going into this year?
BA: Fourteen wins, I mean we had 10 wins the year before, two years ago, 10 wins and we lost on a penalty-kick shootout the year before to end our playoffs in the CAA. So we expected to have a good year. From a standpoint of 14 wins, it looks great. We broke all records. We hope that we can sort of maintain that thing, that we’re in that type of level going forward. We thought it was fabulous that we got the 14, and the most important thing was to win the CAA Championship and then win the tournament, and that was probably the number one goal going into the season.
HN: You guys were undefeated in overtime this season. What were you thinking as you continued to rack up OT and double-OT wins?
BA: People make a big deal out of overtime games. Look around the NCAAs this week, how many games went to penalty kicks, overtime. I think one or two of the games this weekend were won in regulation out of eight games. And it’s sort of the norm now in college soccer because teams don’t even feel like it’s a 90-minute game anymore. This group here has been in teams where we’ve had eight or nine overtime games, similar to this year. So, I just felt this year we were able to find a way to win more than we have in the past. That’s when we felt we were gonna be a good team.
HN: How will the loss of the seniors – Don Anding, Andre Ciliotta, Eric Dyer, Eddie Nam and Oliver Blum – affect the team for next year?
BA: Every year we lose players. Last year we lost some terrific players in Michael Kennedy and Josh Semerene. Don, you’re not gonna go out and replace Don Anding’s work rate. You just hope that you can find the back of the net other ways, with other players. I don’t think someone’s gonna come in and score 15 goals, 14 goals. So it’s not replacing him, it’s just finding other ways to win. He’s been fabulous for us in his four years here. So has Olly [Blum], Andre as players that played an awful lot for me over the last four years. So we’re gonna miss them [since] they’ve pushed the program along the last four years. They’ve had a great college career.
HN: What are you most excited for next year?
BA: We’ve made steps each of the past seven years to push the program along and the goal is that we want to be a top 25 team consistently, cause we’d only just come into the top 25, 30 teams in the country this year and then go back to where we were three years ago. We want it to be consistent. So I’m excited about maintaining the consistency in the program and pushing that vision forward, which is to be a top 25 team.
HN: You’re coming back for your 9th season. What keeps you at Northeastern?
BA: From my standpoint, when I came to Northeastern, the school was really on an upward swing, you could see everything that was going on around. When we took over the program, we were a very underfunded program. The last few years, because of Peter [Roby] and the administration, we’ve been able to get more resources to push the program up. This is the first year that we were fully funded, so I’m looking forward to seeing what we, myself and my staff, can do in the next four years with this program and really push this along. We think we’re gonna be a top 25 team, so Boston is the place I’d love to be.
– By Sarah Moomaw, News Staff
