RPI improves from 279 to 37 in 2 years; Lopes face No. 8 Trojans on Saturday
(Phoenix, AZ) The only spike close to the one Grand Canyon women’s soccer made over the past two years was the one each player’s heart rate experienced Monday upon seeing the Lopes’ NCAA tournament pairing with USC.
Second-year GCU head coach Chris Cissell has engineered the nation’s greatest turnaround in women’s soccer over that two-year span. The Lopes (16-3-2) have leaped 242 spots in the NCAA Ratings Percentage Index to this season’s No. 37 ranking for the program’s first NCAA Division I tournament appearance, a Saturday match at No. 8 USC (13-3-2).
With only four losses in the program’s past 29 matches, GCU has undergone an astounding change from the 4-14-1 season that preceded Cissell’s arrival. That made Monday’s announcement and Sunday’s WAC Tournament championship all the sweeter for four players in their fifth years at GCU.
Those four Lopes and 11 teammates who are academically seniors or graduates “have been through the lowest of lows and now this is the highest of highs,” fifth-year forward Camryn Larsonsaid. “We just feel deserving, honestly, like we earned it. We weren’t given this. We have just worked out butts off to be here in this moment. In the position that we are able to go play USC and actually contend for a win at USC is pretty amazing.”
GCU has more than quadrupled its 2019 goal output to scoring 60 this season, tying the Lopes for the third-most goals in the nation.
They do not want to settle for winning the program’s first WAC regular-season and tournament championships. Along with those feats, GCU is the only program in the nation to go from the nation’s bottom 100 in RPI two years ago to a top-50 ranking this season.
“It’s been an incredible experience,” Cissell said. “For me and our staff to have this kind of turnaround in such a short time, we couldn’t be more proud. It’s not the coaches. It’s the girls. It’s the girls buying into our philosophy, our tactics, our way of coaching and our family atmosphere. Just the belief that the girls have had in themselves is unreal.”
With a win on Saturday, the Lopes would advance to a second-round matchup against the Penn State-Monmouth winner. First, GCU will lock in on a Trojans team that had a common opponent – Utah Valley (USC won 4-2; GCU went 2-0-1, winning 6-2 and 3-0 in the past two weeks).
It was an opportunity that was hard to imagine when the Lopes began the calendar year at 1-7 in Cissell’s first season, which was delayed to 13 months after his hiring.
The program culture changed first. Then, the results did. GCU was on a seven-match unbeaten streak before losing in last season’s WAC Tournament, but the momentum was there to put together this 16-3-2 season for the nation’s 15th-best winning percentage (.810).
“We hang out all the time and that bond outside of soccer is what brings us together on the field and we work for each other,” said WAC Tournament Most Valuable Player Lindsey Prokop, the junior forward who scored game-winning goals in the semifinal and championship games this weekend.
“This is the most built, chemistry team that I’ve been on because we are so close. We always hang out with each other outside of soccer. We do stuff together. We go out to dinner with each other. That is what bring us together on the field as a culture, to play for each other.”
The Lopes knew they were in the NCAA tournament via an automatic berth for winning the NCAA tournament, but they still gathered in a GCU Stadium classroom on Monday with quiet focus on the selection show. With GCU President Brian Mueller and other University employees gathered with them, they watched nearly the entire field be unveiled before cheers erupted twice – for their name and their matchup.
It was a dream sequence, from senior Noah Johnson remarking in championship pregame that it felt like a reality show to Larson and junior teammate Kayla King asking each other on the postgame bus, “Is this real?”
“Wow, I’ve seen other teams do this on their pages and this is us,” Larson said of the tournament reveal. “Four years ago, if you would’ve told me, ‘You guys are going to go to the NCAA tournament,’ I would’ve been like, ‘Hmm, I hope.’ But we are going to the NCAA tournament. It was just a golden moment to see our name pop up there. I just threw my hands up in the air.”
The Lopes entered the postseason as the highest-ranked team in the state with 11 Arizona-bred players. In a short time, they have come a long way to the No. 279 team in the nation.
“Hearing the pride that the girls talk about where they’re at now and where they see this program going, it does make you emotional as a coach because you put so much time, effort and energy and work so hard to get to this to where you’re just so excited when it comes to fruition,” Cissell said.
Press Release courtesy of Grand Canyon Athletics – Paul Coro.
