Caleb Burggraaf
Sports Columnist

The men’s soccer team at Mesa State was bad last year. Let’s not sugar coat it. They were terrible. At least that’s how they looked on the surface. They had no offense, their mid-field supplied barely any assists, and the goalie and defense were the only true reasons that they stayed in any close games. The wins they had came against some of the most mediocre teams in the RMAC, and they couldn’t even win a single game on the road. All in all, not a good year.
But as I mentioned, that is on the surface. When looking deeper into the stats from this team, they really performed pretty close to what was expected of them by most of the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference. Many would call 2009 a rebuilding year for the Mavericks on the pitch.
Of the 21 members of the team, 15 were underclassmen, and of those six remaining juniors and seniors only two played in a position that wasn’t a defensive position. Their starting forwards were freshmen and they had very little experience on the starting group after team leader Eric Anderson graduated the year before and dealing with many off-field issues. The team wasn’t ready for success last year, especially in a tough RMAC that regularly puts out national title contenders.
This year will be different. With a great deal more experience than was available last year, and an abundance of transfer students from both junior colleges and four year schools, the team is set to make a run at an RMAC playoff berth, and possibly a run into the NCAA tournament.
The freshmen starters from last year have more maturity on the field, the midfielders have improved with age and the bench is deeper than ever with talent. All this adds to the return of a defense that managed to keep them in games last year with the exception of goalie Josh Tinaglia, who graduated and stayed as an assistant coach. Tinaglia has been replaced with two goalies battling it out for the starting spot in Billy Martinez and Chris Raines.
Added onto those reasons, are the fact that if the season plays out anything like it did last year, a .500 season will land the Mavs in fifth place in the conference. Give them a record with eight wins and a few draws, and you can suddenly put the team into second or third place.
This isn’t saying that the road ahead is going to be easy. With Fort Lewis, Mines, Metro, and Regis all picked ahead of coach Josh Pittman’s crew, and all of them returning at least seven upper classmen, the RMAC is once again looking to be tougher than ever. But Pittman and the Mesa State Mavericks will have a definite word in how the conference plays out by the end of the 2010 season.
u
cburggra@mesastate.edu