A free kick goal off the foot of senior midfielder Micah Rose ’12 in double overtime won the ECAC South Region Championship for the Swarthmore men’s soccer team on Sunday afternoon. The goal was Rose’s last as a member of the Garnet, and it came after scoreless regulation and overtime periods between the Garnet and the Medaille Mavericks took the championship match right down to the last shot of the year.
After a foul by Medaille in the 103rd minute of play, Rose’s shot eluded the outstretched grasp of Maverick goalkeeper Jimmy Frascati and, as if someone decided that the script needed one last dramatic flourish, struck the left post before ricocheting into the back of the net as his team erupted on the sidelines.
For that goal and his overall level of play over the course of the Eastern College Athletic Conference tournament, Rose was named Most Outstanding Player by the ECAC South Region.
“It was pretty special to win my final game in a Swarthmore shirt. It’s been an amazing four years,” Rose said. “My [senior] class has had a tremendous amount of success and made so many great memories together. It was meaningful for me to end that journey on a positive note.”
With the win, the fourth-seeded Garnet (13-6-1) was able to exact revenge for last year’s defeat at the hands of the Mavericks. It was Medaille (19-4-1) who, a year earlier, had eliminated the Garnet in the second round of theNCAA Championships, ending Swarthmore’s season on penalty kicks after another scoreless match.
Sunday’s match, played on the field of host Alvernia University, proved to be an unexpected defensive battle with both teams’ high-powered offense shut down. On the backline, Cameron French ’14, Arsean Magami ’12 and Jake Weiner ’14 highlighted an effort that kept their team in the game despite being unable to score.
During the week of practice leading up to the tournament, Head Coach Eric Wagner had emphasized the importance of defense, particularly against high-octane Medaille.
“They scored 87 goals this year,” Wagner said of the Mavericks, “and are an unbelievably skillful attacking team, much better than they were last year. But our team was built on, and has continued to succeed on, the strength of our defending.
“I reiterated in training over the last week, ‘We’re going to score goals, but it’s important to make sure that they don’t’ and shutting [Medaille] out last year was not nearly as impressive as it was this year, given that they scored so many goals.”
Cameron French ’14 saw it in terms of perfect execution.
“It was the best day I can remember as far as all of us [on defense] playing together,” Cameron French ’14 said. “[Medaille] had two really good forwards, but we went out and performed well.”
Swarthmore goalkeeper David D’Annunzio, also playing his final collegiate game, went out with a flourish, recording five saves while shutting out the Mavericks for 110 total minutes of play.
For D’Annunzio, it was the 29th and final shutout of a college career that will remain in the school’s record books for a long time to come; the senior goalkeeper from Piedmont, California holds program records for most career shutouts as well as an all-time low Goals Against Average rating.
Medaille’s Frascati, who had eight saves, matched D’Annunzio right up until the end when he was unable to defend Rose’s free kick.
The Garnet offense had chances throughout, with Rose taking two of his team’s three shots on goal in the first half that Frascati was able to keep out of the net.
Swarthmore got another four shots on goal in the second half, but was unable to convert any of them. As the match entered its final minute of regulation, one of their best chances came when Fabian Castro ’12 took a shot from inside the box that just went wide.
In the game’s 102nd minute, D’Annunzio saved what would have been the winning goal for Medaille.
Two minutes later, Rose’s score won the title for Swarthmore.
The Garnet’s participation in the championship game was made possible by their semifinal win on Saturday over Alvernia.
Behind a pair of goals from midfielder Jack Momeyer ’14, Swarthmore beat the host and No. 1 seed 3-1 to advance to the meeting with Medaille.
“It was probably my best game of the year,” Momeyer said, who credited Wagner’s steady influence on the team for creating a relaxed environment that allowed the team to thrive down the stretch.
“The thing he kept coming back to was ‘I don’t want to lose because I want to watch you guys play another game, I want to be with you guys at practice one more time, and that became the theme,” he said.
Added Wagner, “I wanted us from the moment that the regular season ended to concentrate on finishing the season on a positive note, which meant going into the ECAC tournament with the intent to win it. That meant taking it one day at a time and one game at a time.”
The victory ends a difficult season for the program on a high note that serves as a reminder of what this team was capable of. During the regular season, the Garnet faded down the stretch after a hot start and missed the Centennial Conference playoffs entirely after a 2-1 loss to Haverford.
Following that match, the team, though disappointed, emphasized that there was still soccer left to play, and that its focus would stay strong until the season was over. With three wins in five days of ECAC play — a penalty-kick defeat of Frostburg State, the upset of Alvernia and the final over Medaille — it appears as if the Garnet followed through on that promise.
For the team, now is the time to reflect on the roller-coaster ride of the past few weeks, and how it ended. For the departing seniors — Ayman Abunimer ’12, Toby Heavenrich ’12, Pierre Dyer ’12, David Sterngold ’12, Roberto Contreras ’12, Magami, Castro, Rose and D’Annunzio — the victory is another in a great run. The past four years in the men’s soccer program have seen two Centennial Conference Championships (2008 and 2010) and three NCAA Championship appearances (from 2008 to 2010).
While the win over Medaille did not come in conference play, it means that the seniors’ final memory of playing soccer here promises to be one worth remembering.
