Men's soccer secures 16 seed

After losses in three of the team’s previous five games to end the season, the IU men’s soccer team looked anything but strong heading into the NCAA tournament selection show Monday night.

With a loss to Michigan State in the first round of the Big Ten tournament last Wednesday, IU’s RPI dropped to No. 16, and all signs pointed to a first round game to start off the team’s NCAA tournament run.

But as the team sat around several tables laden with half-eaten chicken wings and quesadillas Yogi’s Grill and Bar just after 5:30 p.m. Monday, the players, coaches and fans let out a loud roar of excitement and surprise as it was announced IU had secured a No. 16 seed and a first-round bye.

“We’re very pleased,” IU Coach Todd Yeagley said. “When we saw the RPI today and saw us at 16, we know it was going to be really tight.

“I think it was well deserved, and we know it gets us an opportunity to rest and get ready for a really difficult matchup Sunday, whomever it might be.”

With the No. 16 seed, the Hoosiers will face the winner of the Kentucky-Xavier game that will take place 7 p.m. Thursday in Lexington, Ky. The Hoosiers will play the winner 1 p.m. Sunday at Bill Armstrong Stadium.

This road to the College Cup isn’t an unfamiliar one. Last season, the Hoosiers secured the No. 16 seed in the tournament, and they took down unseeded Old Dominion 3-0 in Bloomington in the second round before falling to eventual tournament champion North Carolina 1-0 in overtime in Chapel Hill, N.C.

With the first round bye, the Hoosiers will have gone 11 days without any competition, a period which sophomore forward Eriq Zavaleta said will help him and his teammates get back on track with what had given the Hoosiers so much success earlier in the season.

“I think we need to go back to where we were at the beginning of the season, giving up no goals or one goal,” Zavaleta said. “I think we need to do better defensively. We’ve got to finish our chances that we have. We’ve created a lot of chances — I don’t think that’s the problem.

“If we can get a team effort to keep goals out of the net and put goals in the net, that’s how we’ll win games.”

If the Hoosiers have some success in the first couple of rounds of the tournament, it will be against teams they know fairly well. Yeagley’s squad took down Kentucky 4-1 on Oct. 3 in Lexington, and IU also faced Xavier last year in a preseason game.

If IU was to win its first game, it would face a Notre Dame team that was one of only three teams this season to keep the Hoosiers scoreless in a 1-0 loss Sept. 26 in Bloomington.

Yeagley said playing familiar opponents might be a little more difficult, but if he and his players perform like they have earlier this season, he likes his team’s odds.

“Sometimes you don’t always want to face a team you’ve played one or two times, but usually you see a familiar face in the first or second round,” Yeagley said. “Our guys feel very good about our performance against Kentucky, and we’ve played Xavier in the preseason, and we know what they’re all about.

“We’ve just got to be really focused on what we need to do.”