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The Daily Tar Heel

Men’s soccer to host St. Mary’s Saturday in NCAA quarterfinals

North Carolina men’s soccer coach Carlos Somoano discusses the Tar Heels NCAA quarterfinal match against the Saint Mary’s Gaels.

With just one more win, the North Carolina men’s soccer team (19-2-2) will punch its ticket to a fourth consecutive College Cup.

But standing in the Tar Heels’ path to Hoover, Ala., are the Gaels from St. Mary’s (Calif.).

If the first two NCAA Tournament games against No. 17 Coastal Carolina and No. 9 Indiana are a reflection of what the rest of the field has to offer, then UNC will be in for another tight battle.

“If you look at where we were last year, it was (penalty kicks) every game,” UNC goalkeeper Scott Goodwin said. “So, if you look at it compared to that, we’re getting through easy. But every game so far has been a very tough game. It’s one of the things about this tournament that everyone is saying this year. There really are no easy teams, no easy games.”

The Gaels finished the regular season 8-6-5 but claimed the top spot in the West Coast Conference to earn the automatic bid into the NCAA Tournament.

In the tournament, Saint Mary’s has knocked off three ranked opponents in Cal State Bakersfield, UC Irvine and Brown.

But rankings don’t matter anymore.

UNC coach Carlos Somoano said that the season records to this point are meaningless and now all the attention is on what will take place on Fetzer Field Saturday at 5 p.m.

“They wouldn’t be here unless they were a good team,” redshirt junior Billy Schuler said. “They’re one of the top eight teams in the country now, that’s how we view it. You can’t take any team lightly at this point.”

North Carolina’s only two losses this season came at the hands of teams much less talented than the Tar Heels. Virginia Tech, the last-place team in the ACC, and Davidson both snuck by UNC 1-0.

Though the Gaels came in to the tournament unranked, Somoano and his team have too much on the line to be looking past this game to the College Cup.

These two teams have only met once before and that was in a season-opening tournament in Winston-Salem in 1990. The Tar Heels won that game 2-1.

Since nearly two decades and most of the United States separate these two teams, they aren’t very familiar with each other.

“They don’t know much about us either, I’m sure,” Somoano said. “So it’ll be two teams that will get to know each other on Saturday.”

All of St. Mary’s upsets in the tournament have been one-goal games, and the last two both came in overtime.

But the Tar Heels are no strangers to close games either. Both the Coastal Carolina and Indiana wins were one-goal margins, and the Hoosiers took UNC to overtime.

In the last seven contests, the Tar Heels have won in overtime three different times. In each game, North Carolina’s leading scorer Schuler has come through with the game winner.

“Our team has a lot of confidence in ourselves when we go into those overtime positions because we’ve been there before. We’ve done it,” Goodwin said. “We’ve showed that we can perform in those situations in the clutch … A lot of times I think we actually play better during overtime and for some reason the pressure even lets us relax a little.

“But history has built up our confidence there, and I think we’re ready if it comes to it again.”

Contact the Sports Editor at sports@dailytarheel.com.

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