From ranked to spanked

Penchant for burnout a concern for womenās soccer team

By Kyle Ringo
The Metropolitan

Watching the womenās soccer season deteriorate into what it eventually became was nastier than staring at the open cadavers in a forensics class.

At least that is what Metro senior Shannon Wise seems to think.

Wise finished her career at Metro when the Roadrunners lost their season finale Nov. 8 at Regis. She is a criminalistics major, and spends some of her class time viewing the dead.
And now she knows how they feel.

ćThatās my release,ä Wise said.

ćIt makes me sick to my stomach knowing how this season went.ä

What is sick is how Metro managed to go from a No. 5 national ranking to a 10-9 final record and far from the elite.

This included a stretch where the Roadrunners lost nine of their last 13 games.

Some players have been quietly complaining for weeks that they are not challenged enough by coaches in practice, while others prefer to place the blame for the second major collapse in four years on the players themselves.

ćItās kind of a hard way to end,ä Wise said. ćWe had the opportunities and skill to win.

ćI donāt think we had a lot of discipline. I donāt think we had a lot of heart.ä

Alarm bells should be blaring in coach Ed Montojoās office.

Such a collapse occurring once might be a fluke. But twice in four years? Sooner or later it becomes a trend.
Montojo has his own ideas of what went wrong.

His ideas have more to do with not having a home field to practice or play on until two-thirds of the season was gone. The fatigue brought on by all the travel between practice and school, school and games and what not ruined the Roadrunners, he said.

Certainly, some of the poor play was borne out of being a homefieldless team. But not all of it. Or any where near all of it.

Last season a group of players went to Athletics Director William Helman to complain about Montojoās coaching style. Helman turned a deaf ear saying in effect that Montojoās record speaks for itself.
Exactly.

Montojo has been extremely successful if winning percentage is all that is taken into account. But what about the bottom line? Finishing.

š Twice in the past four years the Roadrunners have been in the top five. Twice, the other being the 1994 season, the Roadrunners have experienced a monumental collapse. And the 1994 team had a home field and Rosie Durbin (second all-time scorer in Metro history and one of two Roadrunners to be All-American).

š Players, this year and last, say that Montojo just isnāt tough enough in practice and that his game day decision making is questionable.

Montojo is an excellent recruiter and his teams are fast out of the gate. But in sports, itās not about how you start. Itās all about how you finish. Maximizing potential is the most accurate gauge of a coachās ability.
Montojoās teams, namely the 1994 and 1997 squads, had the potential for greatness.

Both flopped, and itās time for Helman and Montojo to do a bit of soul searching and figure out why womenās soccer canāt finish what it starts.

That is the bottom line.