Losing seven games in a row typically doesn’t equate to a championship season, especially when a team’s schedule only includes 16 regular season games.
However, that narrative exactly describes how the Lipscomb men’s soccer season played out.
Despite a forgettable start, the Bisons are in Seattle to make their second-consecutive NCAA tournament appearance on Thursday night against Washington.
“Looking back at the season… it was all fun,” Lipscomb coach Charles Morrow said at Monday’s NCAA selection show watch party.
“That’s something we sort of preach in our program. This is a game and it’s meant to be fun, but there were some trying days in that stretch. For the guys to have the resiliency and perseverance that they did was really, really impressive.”
The Bisons went 1-7 in their first eight games, including a seven-match skid that began in August and continued until late September.
“It was a rough start,” Lipscomb senior forward Logan Paynter said. “[We had] a lot of new guys and knew it wasn’t going to be easy, so we just knew we had to keep learning and keep growing.”
The tough beginning was somewhat expected after losing 10 seniors to graduation, including key cogs like forwards Ivan Alvarado and Ivan Sakou, midfielders Eduardo Reza and Kyle Smith, and defenders Cameron Botes and Joe Kerridge.
But there were some silver linings during that losing streak. Five of the seven losses were by just one goal each, and two of the defeats came in overtime to No. 7 Kentucky and Jacksonville.
“Coming out of last year and losing 10 guys, you know there’s going to be a transition period,” said Paynter, who has nine goals this season and is the school’s all-time leading scorer with 35 tallies.
“You know there’s going to be a lot of learning. You don’t know if it’s going to require that many losses to learn, [but], for our our case, we had to lose some games, learn and come out of that struggle.”
The Bisons (9-9, 7-1 ASUN) matured and came together as the season went along, hitting their stride just as ASUN play began. Lipscomb won eight of its final 10 matches, including a 3-2 shocker at No. 10 Louisville on Oct. 16.
Then Lipscomb put the finishing touches on its turnaround with a 2-0 victory over Stetson in last Saturday’s ASUN championship game.
“This was the goal from the beginning of the year,” Morrow said of clinching an automatic NCAA tournament bid. “[The team] didn’t waver from that. I think that we thought we had the potential to be very good, we just didn’t know how long it would take for the group to come together.”
One key to Lipscomb’s success was the improvement of goalie Chris Zappia, who earned second team All-ASUN honors after delivering his best statistical season. The Bisons lost all five games that Zappia did not start, and the fifth-year senior allowed just 1.31 goals per game and saved 73 percent of the shots he faced.
The emergence of three freshman forwards – Daniel Zapata (3 goals), Louis Robinson (3 goals) and Zarek Jakubowski (2 goals) – was exactly the support Paynter needed up top. And German brothers Noah and Scott Gulden were both named to the ASUN All-Freshman team after helping anchor Lipscomb’s stellar back line.
“We have lots of freshmen that have done a great job this year, so I’m excited about the future,” Morrow said after the team’s 2-1 ASUN semifinal win over Jacksonville on Nov. 4.
Each of those freshmen, along with the team’s upperclassmen, will need to be in top form for the Bisons to have a chance at upsetting Washington.
But this team never gave up on its season when things looked bleak, and, according to Paynter, they aren’t changing their tune for the tournament.
“We never stopped believing that it would come around, and eventually it did,” Paynter said. “Now we’re here, so we want to keep it going.”
Photo courtesy of Lipscomb Athletics