UNIVERSITY PARK — Having the words “defending national champions” appear after the name of your team has many possible impacts. Almost all of them are positive, but some are not so much.
One of the negatives is that those words draw the undivided and unwavering attention of every one of the opponents on your schedule.
For Penn State head women’s soccer coach Erica Dambach, however, that is the kind of attention that her program has fought hard to earn.
“We certainly earned the right to have a target on our back,” Dambach said at Penn State’s fall sports media press conference Aug. 23, “and we have to embrace that.
“We all know what it feels like to go out on a Friday night against the defending national champions. Everybody thrives in that environment. Everybody get up for those games. We will feel that. We will feel opponents certainly coming after us in the early parts of the games, so we’ve got to make sure we are prepared for it and match that intensity. We have to prepare to see everyone’s best match, and that’s the right that we’ve earned.”
The Nittany Lions were 22-3-2 last season, 8-2-1 in the Big Ten (tied for first) and 6-0 in the playoffs on their way to the NCAA title.
There will be work to do, however, to repeat those kinds of numbers in 2016. Nine seniors graduated from that team, including six starters.
Still, 18 letter winners return from a team that Dambach said developed great depth as the season progressed.
The team’s outstanding defense, which did not give up a goal in its final eight games and only 14 all season, loses senior goal tender Britt Eckerstrom and two other starters.
“I think, obviously, our defense will be different this year,” Dambach said. “We have new players in three of the five spots and that’s going to create some differences.
“If you remember back to our defense at the beginning of last season, we needed to have a lot of growth in a very short period of time. That’s going to be the case again.
“We had a lot of young players on that back line, and under leadership of Britt (Eckerstrom) they were able to grow quickly. This year, Brit Basinger will take on that role. So our starting point this year is similar to our starting point last year. The question is where will the end point be.”
Offensively, some facets of the team’s identity are emerging already after the first two games of the season (a 1-1 tie with West Virginia and a 3-1 win over Hofstra).
Sophomore midfielder Charlotte Williams scored two goals in the Hofstra game and drew high praise for her efforts.
“I think we all saw the talent right from the start with Charlotte,” senior captain Nickolette Driesse said, “and over time she was doing the work on her own. You would see her out there early before practice, and I think her hard work is starting to pay off.”
Penn State was the No. 2 school in the nation in the NSCAA poll and was ranked at the No. 1 team in the Big Ten going into the season.
Yet everyone remembers how long the road was in 2015 and there isn’t anything being taken for granted.
“Coming off a national championship, you don’t really know what you’re expecting,” Driesse said. “But I think that the coaches have done a great job of driving the standard and setting the expectations. We’ve all bought into that standard, and if we do that, we can be very successful.”
