To the Norwich men’s soccer team, the playoffs are just business as usual.
“We’ll just go out and do what we do,” said Mike Lee, 21, a senior architecture major from Syracuse, N.Y.
“We don’t worry too much about tactics,” Lee said. “It’s just having confidence and doing what we need to do.”
After winning 3-0 against Emmanuel last weekend, the team is headed to the semifinal round of the GNAC tournament.
Lee said that at the beginning of the season the team made adjustments for positions on the field, but now they have found their niche.
The team’s strength is when they play their own game and not their opponents, according to Anthony Amell, 19, a sophomore engineering management major from Northfield, Vt.
For the playoffs, Amell has the same mindset as Lee.
“We went 0-2 to start the season, but we’ve gone 5-0 in the last five games,” Amell said. “So we should keep doing what we’re doing and try not to mess with it too much.”
Amell said that it doesn’t matter which team NU is placed against in the first round of the playoffs. “We have to beat everyone anyway,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter who we play the first round,” agreed Lee. “Our biggest enemy is ourselves and there’s no one that we can’t beat.”
Ryan Campbell, 18, a freshman physical education major from Damascus, Md., said that he wants to play either Albertus Magnus or Emerson in the first round.
“They are the two teams we lost to,” Campbell said. “But we could definitely beat them the second time around.”
“If we play Emerson again we’ll be fine,” Amell said. “We weren’t scoring a lot of goals at the beginning of the season, but we’ve changed that lately and kids have been stepping in at key parts.”
Campbell said that he feels that the team has good communication and that they pass well together.
“We’re really close knit,” said Nathan Bacon, 18, a mechanical engineering major from Randolph, Vt. “Everyone has each other’s back.”
According to Lee, there are usually a lot of seniors on the team to help push it forward, but this year there are only two. “But what really drives the team right now are the underclassmen,” hr said.
Lee says that it has been a real adventure this year with the team developing a personality. He said that it has really been an interesting experience.
“We are a young team,” said Lee. “And the soul of the team belongs to the underclassmen.”