It is early yet for Virginia men’s soccer. The season is, after all, just six games old. But the pressure, distant a week ago, is slowly mounting.
The Cavaliers’ meeting Saturday with California seems ordinary — early in the season, nothing officially at stake — but that is deceiving. This is a case of a season’s most important game masquerading as a common contest. This is a case of a team terribly needing a win.
“It’s the most important thing for our season,” sophomore defender Brendan Lambe said Wednesday. “Really. I don’t think there’s any other way to put it. We have to win.”
If Lambe and company win, a 23-day winless period evaporates and three crucial conference points arrive. A loss or a draw, against a California team nailed to the conference’s floor, would calcify the cloud of pressure into a minor crisis.
The game leaps off the calendar for another reason. Not since 2014 has Virginia traveled west of South Bend, Ind., in the regular season, and not since 2009 has it gone to the west coast in the regular season.
Until this season, it remained a choice for a team to safari out west, a voluntary endeavor. Many top eastern programs did it anyway, staging appetizing games against the top teams out west. Coach George Gelnovatch did not.
“I think it makes no sense, given how compact the college soccer season is,” he said Wednesday.
Gelnovatch insisted he never judged other programs for doing it. To him, it just never made sense — James Madison, a strong program, sits an hour down the road.
“Go over there and play them,” Gelnovatch said. “Or go to Maryland. They’re a top 25 RPI. Instead of flying 3,000 miles, beating the heck out of my team and then coming and trying to play in the ACC.”
Starting this season, Gelnovatch has no choice. Flying 3,000 miles is now part of playing in the ACC, after the conference added California, Stanford and Southern Methodist in August.
Gelnovatch favored the additions, he said. They bolstered the league’s strength, impossible as that seems. The Cardinal and the Mustangs have lounged among the sport’s top programs recently, and Gelnovatch says the Golden Bears are on the rise.
But Saturday represents Virginia’s first encounter with the more annoying aspect of expansion. Cross-country travel is a logistical headache. Gelnovatch has, in his long career, developed what he calls a scheduling template, where the program thoughtfully weighs its scheduling choices.
“We really are almost kind of scientific about how we do our scheduling,” Gelnovatch said. “And so the Cal trip, in particular, throws a wrench into that.”
It wrecks that perfectly molded template and causes Virginia to avoid playing midweek games before and after their trip to California. That leaves a scheduling quirk, with consecutive weeks without a midweek game.
But that may not be a bad thing. Typical college soccer schedules are crushingly dense, leaving no time to breathe in between games. Recovery becomes a premium. The midweek openings, though, allow time for hard training sessions.
“We’ve got some really meaningful training sessions in,” Gelnovatch said. “And we’ve gotten some guys back from injury.”
By the time of Saturday’s kickoff, it will be over three weeks without a win for Gelnovatch and the Cavaliers. The stretch started with an away draw against Maryland, a respectable result but one that could have been a win if not for a couple missed chances. Then came a home loss to Duke and a draw against Wake Forest.
Virginia missed a penalty in the first half against the Demon Deacons that would have given them a 2-0 lead. The Cavaliers seemed likely to put away the game in the first half, but in the second they resorted to hunkering down and fighting for their life, clinging to the solitary point.
“Not the end of the world,” Gelnovatch said about the draw. “By any stretch of the imagination. But the expectation is for three points.”
That expectation has gone unfulfilled, but plenty of positives have materialized. The defending has been resolute, senior goalkeeper Joey Batrouni has been his stalwart self and the chances, at times, have flowed. Virginia is just waiting on some sort of magical click, the moment when everything coalesces.
That click happened last year. Virginia started 3-2-0, with a troubling loss to Loyola Marymount, and recovered to launch a 10-game unbeaten run and earn the NCAA Tournament No. 7 seed. It happened the year before, too — a 3-3-0 start, including getting beaten down by Maryland, that the team turned around on its way to the No. 4 seed.
This click could start Saturday. Virginia flew out Thursday and will return on a Saturday red-eye flight after playing at 4 p.m. PST. Then the team will have almost a week to prepare to host Stanford, the nation’s top-ranked team.
That game will have some extra significance for Lambe, who knows some people at Stanford. They have been chirping him a bit, he said, from all the way across the country. The prospect of conference expansion and of competing against good teams is exciting for him.
When asked about the cross-country trip, he laughed. There are the hardships of travel, schlepping to the opposite coast, acclimating to the time change and the weather and the environment. Then there is keeping up at one of the country’s best academic institutions while doing all that.
“I’m kind of thinking about school,” Lambe said. “Got a few tests to make up.”
His biggest test, though, may be on the field. That one arrives Saturday, when Lambe will try to help his team notch a crucial victory.
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