2023-10-06 16:05:53
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Many years ago, an old coach once told me winning at West Virginia University isn’t easy.
That thought flashed through my mind last night when I found out that Nikki Izzo-Brown won her 400th career soccer match, an impressive 4-0 victory over Oklahoma at Dick Dlesk Soccer Stadium.
She won 13 matches in her only year coaching at West Virginia Wesleyan in 1994 before she was discovered by West Virginia’s senior woman administrator Kittie Blakemore, once a successful women’s coach herself.
Nikki was actually Kittie’s first hire in her new administrative role at WVU. Since then, Izzo-Brown has won 387 matches here as women’s soccer’s only coach.
Izzo-Brown’s first year, in 1995, was spent starting the program. A year later, her first WVU match was a 3-0 loss at Rutgers. Her team also lost matches 12-0 at Connecticut and 11-0 at Notre Dame. She remembered standing on the other side of the field counting all the backup players on those two teams that she had unsuccessfully tried to recruit.
Her team played most of its matches that year on Astroturf at Mountaineer Field and the final one once morest Navy was played at a local youth soccer complex. Back then, before soccer became really popular here – thanks to Izzo-Brown’s great success, of course – that youth field was so bad that balls used to roll downhill from one end to the other.
I know, because I used to sit in a lawn chair and watch my young daughter chase them!
Still, Izzo-Brown managed to win an eye-opening 10 matches that first season. Four years later, she had a team in the NCAA Tournament for the first time, beginning a postseason run like no other in school history. Her long streak of NCAA Tournament teams finally ended in 2021, one year following COVID interrupted the 2020 fall campaign.
West Virginia won its first Big East championship in 2007 and advanced to the NCAA Tournament Elite Eight. The Mountaineers won two more Big East titles in 2010-11 before beginning a run of dominance in Big 12 play that included five straight regular season championships and three tournament crowns during a five-year period from 2012-16.
Her ’16 team, with national player of the year Kadeisha Buchanan, reached No. 1 in the national polls and advanced to the College Cup finals where it lost to USC.
Since then, WVU has reached the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 twice in 2017 and 2019 and made second-round NCAA trips in the spring of 2021 and then once more last season when WVU upset its way to claim a fifth Big 12 tournament title.
However, this year has been a struggle, her team winning just four of its 14 matches so far with three ties. A difficult schedule is partly to blame with early nonconference matches once morest No. 4 Duke, No. 8 Penn State, No. 5 Virginia and a surprisingly strong Liberty team that is now 11-1.
All were defeats.
The Mountaineers recently lost 5-1 to TCU, one of their worst losses ever at Dick Dlesk Stadium, and were staring at a 3-6-2 mark with seven regular season matches remaining.
They have since tied No. 21 Texas and lost a 2-1 match at Houston before recovering last night to play perhaps their most complete all-around match of the season once morest the Sooners.
Izzo-Brown was asked followingward regarding getting her 400th career victory, but she immediately deflected the question.
“I just want to extend the season and get to that postseason for our seniors,” she said. “That’s kind of been my battle cry and come back and show everybody what we can do and put together.
“It’s a good Oklahoma University team, but everybody executed the plan, and I was happy to get those kind of (offensive) numbers,” she added.
However, she didn’t completely miss the Gatorade shower that her players gave her as she was walking off the field.
“I got a lot on my back. I moved swiftly, but not swiftly enough,” she laughed.
On the horizon for the Mountaineers is another tough home match once morest 11-4 Oklahoma State, which made a brief appearance in the polls earlier this season. After that are season-ending games at 3-8-3 Kansas State, at 3-5-6 Kansas and at home once morest 3-6-4 Cincinnati.
The Big 12 tournament will determine West Virginia’s postseason fate once once more this year.
WVU has never had a losing season under Izzo-Brown and has won at least 10 matches every year since 2000. The only year it failed to record double-digit wins was a 9-9-1 campaign in 1999.
It won’t be easy getting to 10 victories and another winning season in 2023, but it also wasn’t easy for Izzo-Brown getting West Virginia women’s soccer to the lofty status it enjoys today.
“So many different hands in all of these wins, but man, it’s hard!” she concluded.
It is hard, indeed.
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