When Cabrini exited the locker rooms at Wesleyan last May, it knew it had a good team coming back.
What the Cavaliers didn’t expect was the adversity it would have to overcome to return to the NCAA Tournament. The team, which lost in the third round last season to the Cardinals, proceeded to lose two of its returning All-Americans with injuries in the first three games of the season.
Matt LoParo, who scored 41 goals and dished out 39 assists last year, went down in the opener, leaving a void in the Cabrini lineup. Then Timmy Brooks went down in the third game, although he did make appearances in the Cavaliers’ third-round contest and then again in the semifinals.
Cabrini (21-9) has also had to juggle some of its lines in the midfield due to injury, leaving coach Steve Colfer the unenviable job of trying to cobble together a lineup. And through it all, the Cavaliers continued to thrive and earn their way to the program’s first national championship game Sunday against fellow first-timer Amherst in Philadelphia.
“It’s been a little bit of a wild ride, we’ve had to reform ourselves a couple of times throughout the year,” Colfer said in an NCAA teleconference on Tuesday. “There have been a couple of editions and versions of us throughout the year. That’s what I’ve been most proud about of these kids is the way they’ve been so resilient and responded to that.”
The Cavaliers (21-2) did not have much of a choice if it wanted to keep their hopes of the NCAA Tournament alive. Cabrini didn’t have a path to an automatic berth into the postseason except winning because it joined the newly-formed Atlantic East Conference, which won’t have an automatic bid from the NCAA until the 2020-21 season.
As a result, the program needed to be selected as one of nine at-larges from either Pool B — independents and other programs in a conference without an automatic bid — or Pool C — the other teams that didn’t earn their conference’s bid.
“When you have a tournament at the end of your regular season that you know the winner of that gets the automatic bid, there’s a security blanket there,” Colfer said. “You can explain away losses in the locker room as coaching staff by saying ‘We didn’t have our best day, but we’re going to bounce back and we’re going to learn from that and we’ll continue to push forward to be our best.’ Some of those things were still said because we obviously didn’t go through the season undefeated, but it did clean the process up for our guys mentally.”
No matter who was in the lineup, the Cavaliers continued to win and score goals at an impressive rate. Just four of their 17 wins entering the NCAA Tournament came by eight goals or fewer, knowing that style points might matter in deciding their postseason fate. Cabrini also couldn’t afford to take any games off, sticking to the “1-0 every day” mentality that has become prevalent across college football.
That was the comparison Colfer used when describing how the mentality fit his team’s situation this season. He said the players knew that a good season that might allow them to still win their way into the NCAA tournament field via the conference tournament, but they needed to be that much better to impress the committee enough to earn their spot in the bracket.
“They knew we weren’t looking two or three games down the road,” Colfer said. “It had to be a 1-0 mentality throughout because if we didn’t stack enough of those up, what would be a good year needed to be a better than good year for us even to get into the tournament and be here and have a chance to talk about this team.”