Robyn and Phil Dang rented an apartment in Earlysville, Va., this fall. It’s a small place, reasonably priced, some 20 minutes from Klöckner Stadium, an ideal base from which to go watch their son, junior defender Nick Dang, menace opposing forwards in his first season since transferring from Lipscomb.
Just a quick drive down Route 29, and there they are, in the stands at every home game, wearing their custom No. 2 Nick Dang soccer jerseys, recently underneath a fleece or a coat as the nighttime chill burrows in. It has been great, Dang said, having them around.
“It’s nice,” Dang said. “Just having that constant support, and just going over for a home-cooked meal, which is hard to do when you’re an eight-hour drive from home.”
Those eight hours lie between Charlottesville and Brentwood, Tenn., where Dang grew up and where Robyn and Phil still live. Brentwood sits about 15 minutes from Lipscomb, the program to which Dang belonged for the first three years of his career.
“That’s our backyard,” Phil Dang said. “So it was really easy to go to the games. When he came here, it was a little bit more difficult to do that.”
They wrestled with the logistics, looking at transportation, examining hotels. Nothing really made sense. Then Robyn had the idea to look for a rental place.
They found one, and they went for it. The plan, Dang said, originally had them staying through early November and then moving out. They may want to squeeze an extra couple weeks from their landlord. Virginia seems likely — amid a streak of five wins from six games, receiving votes in the polls for the first time in two months — to keep playing a good deal past early November. That is in large part because of Robyn and Phil’s son.
Coach George Gelnovatch, in a preseason interview, called Dang one of a couple “exceptional transfer pickups.” He had only the faintest clue how right he would be.
Dang has anchored the back line, a sliding, thundering, heroic presence back there. He leads the team with six goals, the most in the country among defenders. He even donned the captain’s armband against UNC Greensboro, filling the temporary absence of two of the team’s three captains.
“He’s a warrior,” Gelnovatch said after a Sept. 2 game against Maryland. “He seems to be getting better with every game.”
Gelnovatch made that comment seven weeks ago. It still feels true. Dang still appears to be improving with every performance, drawing more incredulous laughs with every goal and every impossible, crunching tackle.
The Cavaliers entered their Oct. 15 game against American riding a crashing wave of momentum, three games into a five-game win streak, having just eked out a trio of thrilling wins to reverse a barren period. Then they suffered a temporary letdown. The Eagles, heavy underdogs, scored twice in the first 13 minutes. Klöckner sat shocked and silent.
Six minutes later, up came a Virginia corner, and out rushed the American goalkeeper. His punch came off horribly miscalculated, the ball popping up and drifting backward, dropping toward the goal.
Three defenders sidled to the goalmouth. But charging toward them, redirecting his run, eyes locked on the ball in the sky, went Dang. His head surmounted the jumping defenders and the backpedaling goalie. His header scored.
Dang has a reliable goal celebration. It is nothing choreographed, more of a visceral reaction, a scream as he wheels away to the corner flag, arms outstretched, leaping into the pile of bodies spilling from the bench. He altered it a little after the goal against American, turning quickly back for the restart with his team still trailing.
It just made sense that Dang would be the one to kickstart a comeback that ended in a triumphant 4-2 win. He scored again the following game against Syracuse — his sixth goal of the season, making him the most prolific goal-scoring defender in the country.
Robyn and Phil Dang never imagined, in their wildest dreams, that their son would lead the team, much less all the defenders in the country, in goals. Maybe another category.
“We kind of knew he’d be a leader in yellow cards,” Phil Dang said. “Just kind of the defense he plays. He plays real hard.”
But goals?
“No,” Robyn Dang said. “I mean, for a defender, to be the leading scorer? [Senior forward Hayes Woods’s] dad is like, ‘Who would have thought Nick would be a scoring machine?’ I was like, ‘Well, not us.’”
They laughed, beatifically and disbelievingly, just like their son did when asked the same question.
Dang left Lipscomb last winter, joining Virginia in the spring semester. He credited the extra months spent acclimating for some of his success this season.
“It helped a lot,” he said. “Just getting to know the guys, their tendencies, what runs they make, as well as coaches, what kind of work ethic they ask for and what style of play they want to play. It’s huge. A semester is a huge difference.”
Gelnovatch said Dang was one of the team’s best players by the end of the spring. He has only taken that to another level this fall.
His parents have been there to see it all. They love watching the games, and they love it around Charlottesville. They have also traveled to the away games — to Maryland, to Boston College, to Wake Forest.
The most recent of those was Friday at Pittsburgh. Robyn and Phil Dang journeyed to that one, too. They plan to make every game, all the way through the postseason — even if they had planned to move out in early November.
They may extend their apartment lease. They may find somewhere else to stay. Either way, they will be there, in their custom No. 2 Nick Dang soccer jerseys, watching as their son attempts to add postseason team success to his growing list of individual accolades.
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