Two weeks ago we mentioned that the University of Tampa women’s soccer team made it to the final round of the NCAA Division II national tournament. And we lamented the dearth of local media attention paid to such a worthwhile story.
Judging by what we’ve read, it was wild tourney for UT full of interesting sidebars. More on that below. Before going any further, though, congratulations to the 2007 National Champion UT Spartans!
Well done, ladies.
Local media woke up, sort of, to report the semi-final and final rounds. Read their coverage here, here and here. Pretty sterile for the most part, we’re sorry to say. We think they might have missed a chance to tell one of those colorful underdog-triumphant-feel-good stories that sports in general give us every so often.
This season, for example, was just the tenth for women’s soccer at UT. The Spartans had to beat last year’s tournament nemisis, Grand Valley State University, in order to advance to the 2007 championship game. Read about that game here. GSVU entered this year’s semi-final game with a virtually unblemished record of 21-0-1. So, David took on Goliath, again.
The championship game was decided by a shootout (which we despise as a way to decide championships but that’s a subject for another post). That goes down in the record book as a shutout for both teams’ goaltenders. By reading TampaSpartans.com we learned that it was the 14th shutout of the season for Spartan goaltender Shannon Aitken, a senior from Land O’Lakes, and the 40th of her college career.
Aitken is a hometown-kid-done-good sidebar for you, if there ever was one. It’s so stinking obvious that we think we probably just missed it in our search but we couldn’t find it, which makes us think it doesn’t exist. If not, that’s a shame. Thousands of girls just a few years younger than her play soccer in this area. We suspect she’s a worthy role model for them. The fish wrappers missed a chance to score points with some younger readers on that one.
While we’re on the subject of collegiate soccer, congratulations also are in order for the USF men’s soccer team, which made it to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Division I national tournament before losing this past weekend to the Connecticut Huskies 5-0. USF won 14 games this year, lost six and posted two draws.
Well done, lads.