Jeanette Huck hopes to lead her Tigers to an AUS Championship this weekend in Wolfville.
(photo credit: Nick Pearce)
by Bill McLean
The Men’s and Women’s Soccer teams at Dalhousie are off to the AUS championships this weekend, and just like last November, the expectations of Tigers Nation are high.
The women will be the number two seed at their tourney in Acadia and enjoy a well deserved first round bye, while the men will be seeded third in Moncton and have to contend with the plucky Aigles Bleus in what should be a high energy affair in front of a raucous crowd.
Both Tigers teams are coming off bitterly disappointing conclusions to their 2009 seasons. Each were heavily favored to play in the AUS championship game, and each came up one game short on the same cold, bitter weekend in early November.
Jack Hutchinson’s Tigers suffered their first loss of the year in falling to the Saint Francis Xavier X-Women on a frigid Saturday in St.John’s, while Pat Nearing’s men’s team lost a grueling 4-3 thriller to the UPEI Panthers at Wickwire Field.
Jeannette Huck and her teammates will once again travel to an AUS championship with a banner in their sights, but this time it’ll just be an hour down the road to Wolfville.
If the Tigers can make good in Saturday’s semi final, likely vs. the surging Cape Breton Capers, they can book their ticket to the CIS championships in PEI, and play an AUS Championship final vs. the Panthers.
Ross Hagen and the men face a far more daunting task; entering the tourney as the third seed and playing sixth seeded Moncton in the opening round. Le Aigles Bleus were seeded sixth in the 2009 championships at Dalhousie and quickly became the darlings of the tournament after knocking off the UNB Varsity Reds in the opening round and nearly beating the eventual champion Cape Breton Capers in the semi finals.
Moncton no longer has dynamo midfielder Olivier Babineau, but still has a spirited, attacking team that should be a handful for the Tigers, who have struggled at times this year with teams that aggressively try to control the tempo.
If the Tigers are able to tame Le Aigles Bleus, they will then have to contend with the Saint Mary’s Huskies, featuring the electrifying Jhonnatan Cordoba in the semi final.
Should they manage to frustrate Cordoba and beat the Huskies, they would then have to play either St. FX, the number one ranked team in the country, or the ever dangerous defending champion Capers.
No easy task.
Only one team in the AUS men’s conference is eligible for nationals this year, so the road ahead for the Tigers is difficult to say the least.
Like the women’s team, they definitely have momentum on their side. After a sluggish September which concluded with a 6-1 whipping at the hands of Huskies, the men’s team posted a record of 5-1-3 in their last nine games.
The Lady Tigers were remarkably consistent all season, losing only to the regular season champion UPEI Panthers in October and the Memorial Seahawks on the last day of the season in a game that had no relevance in the final standings.
Hagan and Huck are in serious contention to be AUS MVP’s of their respective conferences, and each team has stellar goalkeeping in Taryn McKenna and Ben Ur. Finally, both teams have a bevy of talent, youth, and experience.
This has been the strikingly similar story of these two teams this past calendar year. They are tied together by feats of incredible achievement, moments of excruciating disappointment, and strangely bizarre coincidence.
On Sunday, November 7th, in Moncton, New Brunswick and Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Tigers fans are hopeful that both programs will be coincidentally raising AUS Championship banners.
Bill McLean is the voice of the Dalhousie Tigers on ssncanada.ca. Follow us on twitter @haligoniasports, and listen to Bill McLean Sports Show every Tuesday morning at 10:30 on ckdu.ca, 88.1 FM in Halifax.
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