Coming into this week’s reading, I knew that Appalachian State heavily prioritized basketball and football over any other sport. It doesn’t take much research to figure this out as the schools display these sports teams like a badge of honor. Meanwhile, I hear so little about our other sports teams that they could go undefeated or winless and I would never know. Thus, while I didn’t know about this beforehand, it does not surprise me that our soccer team has a forgotten storied history. However, I was surprised to figure out just how big our soccer team was. The fact that they won ten of eleven straight conference championships and were selling out Kidd Brewer Stadium during this time is fascinating to me. With this knowledge, it pains me to see how far the program has fallen because it would’ve been so much fun to see such a dominant team play today. I think a quote from former head coach Hank Steinbrecher puts it best when he says, “I think ASU had a goldmine and they wasted it.” While the football team has been dominant over the years, the fact that we had a soccer team that was twice as dominant and now don’t have a program anywhere near as prestigious is a tragedy.
The other aspect of this reading that I didn’t know about before was the way in which the team recruited top players. Coming into this, I thought that this team would’ve had to have been built through hidden gems found in North Carolina. So when I learned that not only did the team recruit players across the country, but also around the world, I was shocked. Seeing that we were able to get top-class players to move across the country to Boone, North Carolina of all places is fascinating. Seeing how through being so personal and accommodating to players we got them to come here over more prestigious universities and nicer cities is impressive. It only serves to reinforce the sadness I feel over not having such a dominant team anymore as I could only imagine how talented of players we could’ve gotten if we had continued to build on this foundation. We could’ve been a collegiate soccer powerhouse, but instead, we are just fighting to win the Sun Belt Conference.
