Seven gold stars sit atop the crest of the Virginia men’s soccer jersey, one for each national championship. Those stars represent a pedigree, a legacy. They mark an expectation.
Over the last couple of years, that expectation has not seemed completely out of reach. The Cavaliers remain entrenched among the men’s soccer elite. Heading into the fall, another strong season seems likely, with dynamic new players dotting a solid returning squad. But Coach George Gelnovatch still has a plain directive guiding the upcoming season.
“It’s time to get over the hump,” Gelnovatch said in a recent interview with The Cavalier Daily.
He had no need to elaborate. Virginia, the only program in the country to earn top-eight NCAA Tournament seeds each of the last two years, has now twice failed to advance past the third round.
Gelnovatch’s last national championship was in 2014. His last visit to the national championship game came in 2019 against Georgetown, an epic marathon of a soccer game that dangled triumph before hungry eyes and then ripped it away, on penalty kicks, no less. The hunger, of course, has not abated. But now it might finally be satiated.
Gelnovatch is scrambling, in the shrinking days leading up to the season’s Aug. 22 kickoff, to integrate promising transfers with returning stalwarts. He seems pleased with the progress if not slightly uncertain, optimistic about the squad even as it navigates a crammed preseason.
“We have enough core guys, and some exciting transfers, that my expectations are that we take advantage of the past two years of guys gaining experience to know what it’s like to be a top seed, to be in the NCAA Tournament under a lot of pressure,” Gelnovatch said.
Gelnovatch’s confidence lies, above anything, in his clump of proven returners. Back to stalk the midfield are junior Umberto Pelà and junior Albin Gashi. Senior defender Paul Wiese, a mainstay in the back, and junior defender Reese Miller are also returning. Those four players constitute the team’s most trusted group of returners, pillars of a relatively established defense and midfield.
But things get murkier up top. Stephen Annor Gyamfi, last season’s leading goalscorer, is gone, selected 26th overall by the Houston Dynamo in the 2024 MLS Superdraft. Inter Miami snatched Leo Afonso, last season’s top postseason scorer, a few picks later. And Mouhameth Thiam, an All-ACC first team selection in his lone season with the Cavaliers, graduated.
“Those guys accounted for 20 goals,” Gelnovatch said. “We think we brought in some goalscorers, specifically in transfer guys. But they’re new, and so we’re trying to get them up to speed.”
The goalscoring responsibilities may fall chiefly to two of those transfers, sophomore forward AJ Smith and graduate forward Hayes Wood. Smith, a 6-foot-4 Danish steamroller, scored 18 goals in 22 games last season at Tyler Junior College, but now is in the process of making a gargantuan transition in a miniscule window. Wood, a former first-team All-ASUN selection at Lipscomb, will transition more easily.
Patrolling the field’s opposite end will be returning senior goalkeeper Joey Batrouni, an athletic specimen who stepped in early last season and performed tremendously. Gelnovatch confirmed that he is the starter, but behind him lies chaos, a logjam.
“Yes, we have five goalkeepers,” Gelnovatch said. “Is it ideal? No.”
But Gelnovatch felt uncomfortable relying on his two other returning goalkeepers and one incoming freshman, none of whom had ever played in an official game, to back up Batrouni. So he added one more. Graduate student Tom Miles, an experienced player who transferred from Division II program Lubbock Christian, is the presumptive primary backup.
Every position ultimately has options galore, a gift but also a curse as the coaching staff sorts things out. Whichever assemblage of players takes the field could have its hands full. The preseason poll surfaced recently, and the results are almost unbelievable. The top 25 features 10 ACC teams, and the top 10 has five of them, including No. 1 Clemson and No. 2 Notre Dame.
No. 13 Virginia, amazingly, dodged a bullet, — four bullets, actually. It will play only one of the preseason’s five highest-ranked ACC teams — No. 5 Stanford, one of the conference’s new members, in a home matchup.
But preseason rankings are neither art nor science — they are guesswork. The number of ranked opponents on Virginia’s schedule — five out of 16, right now — will fluctuate as the season progresses and the polls shift.
The season begins with three lighter non-conference games at Klöckner Stadium, beginning this week with Rider and followed by battles against Colgate and St. Joseph’s. Then on Sept. 2 comes the first true road trip to Maryland since 2015. The once-hostile rivalry between the two programs has faded in most sports but remains powerfully charged in soccer. This latest chapter arrives after a 2-1 Virginia victory last season, which avenged a 6-1 drubbing the Terrapins laid down in 2022.
That game will be a necessary appetizer for the tough gauntlet of ACC play to follow. The conference slate includes confrontations on Sept. 6 and Sept. 13 with No. 20 Duke and No. 15 Wake Forest, along with a Sept. 21 trip to conference newcomer California.
At the end of the regular season lies an oddity. Virginia’s last opponent is not a conference foe. It is not a regional rival or even a member of the same division. It is Mary Washington, a Division III program whose addition to the schedule creates a fascinating and mutually beneficial collision.
The ACC schedule this season assigned each team a weekend off, and Virginia’s fortuitously fell right before the postseason. Scheduling Mary Washington allows players serving a one-game suspension for yellow card accumulation to serve their sentence on an ultimately meaningless game.
“For a lot of reasons, it just made a little bit of sense,” Gelnovatch said. “I know it’s different. And it doesn’t hurt you, either, because it doesn’t count for RPI.”
It will also provide a chance for starters to rest during a lighter game heading into the postseason. This is important, of course, because in the postseason lies all the hardware, everything Virginia men’s soccer has been chasing recently.
A formidable core and some promising transfers could bring that coveted eighth star within reach. The hump, though, will remain planted in Virginia’s path, looming and obstinate, until the Cavaliers find a way to get over it.
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