Winning a national championship is hard. Building up a program to become a perennial championship contender is even harder.
No person knows that better than Chris Ducar, the longtime UNC women’s soccer assistant coach who was promoted to general manager of the team in September. In his 26 years with the program, Ducar has helped lead the Tar Heels to nine NCAA championships as an elite goalkeeper coach and recruiting coordinator.
When Ducar arrived at UNC in 1996, the young coach was splitting time between Chapel Hill and Greensboro, where he was working part-time for UNC-Greensboro’s team.
“The first initial reason for hiring was just to bring him in to make sure we took care of something that was critically important. I mean, holy cow is your goalkeeping important,” Head Coach Anson Dorrance said. “And so we had to bring in someone that understood how to do it, who was very good at it, who would commit himself to it.”
In his first few years, Ducar proved he was a valuable asset to the team, willing to dive headfirst into any task placed before him. In 1998, Dorrance asked him to take charge of the program's recruiting and become a full-time coach.
“It was overwhelming at first because I had no background in this," Ducar said. "I was basically thrown in the deep end."
But within a few seasons, he began to excel in the recruiting game. In order to get an edge on competing programs, Ducar developed a strategy to land the best recruits early.
“I looked at the way recruiting was going, and I said, ‘Hey, we are the name brand in women's soccer. Why are we doing it like everybody else?’”
Traditionally, teams would begin scouting players during their junior year of high school, start communicating with them over the summer and then take them on official visits during their senior year.
