By Daniel Johnson, Sports Editor
Allison Thomas wouldn’t usually have considered ACU, but a single visit changed that.
In December, she came to a school more than 1,200 miles from her hometown of Pasadena, Calif., and found two reasons to choose ACU: the friendly people and the new ACU women’s soccer team.
“I’m from California, so I’m used to rude people and a big city,” Thomas said. “Everyone in Texas is so nice.”
Thomas, who has played soccer since age six, always wanted a scholarship to play college soccer. But because she wasn’t accepted right out of high school to her first choice, she ended up attending Pasadena City Junior College and playing soccer as a walk on.
Now, thanks to the newest addition to the list of Division II sports ACU offers, Thomas has a chance to mark her goal as complete.
“I finally fulfilled my goal,” Thomas said.
It was stories like Thomas’ that pushed ACU athletic director Jared Mosley to bring soccer to ACU. Before ACU added the new sport, he said he frequently spoke with prospective students who would have come to ACU if it had a soccer team.
“We and admissions would always field calls from parents saying, ‘My daughter would have gone here if you offered soccer,'” Mosley said. “Those phone calls got to the point where we said, ‘Hey it’s as good a time as any.'”
But the decision to add the program wasn’t entirely in Mosley’s hands.
He had to propose a plan to ACU President Royce Money and his Cabinet, and the addition had to be approved by the university’s planning and budget committees. The committees analyzed the financial and social impact the new sport would have on ACU.
“It was well thought out,” Mosley said.
Also considered was ACU’s need to offer the same number of women’s sports as they did men’s sports because of the federal requirement under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
According to the NCAA Web site, Title IX is enforced to prohibit sex discrimination in all education programs – including athletic programs – that receive benefit from federal funding.
And an unbalance of sports offered is seen as sex discrimination.
Women’s soccer, the 14th sport offered by the university, helped even the list to seven men’s sports and seven women’s sports when the university added soccer in the fall of 2007.
Despite the need to comply with federal requirements, Mosley is adamant that Title IX wasn’t the main reason ACU now offers a women’s soccer team.
“In our conversations we never wanted to add a sport just solely because we felt the pressure of Title IX,” Mosley said. “We felt that by adding women’s soccer we had an unbelievable amount of support.”
More support than women’s golf, another option Mosley said ACU considered.
“If we wanted to add women’s golf we could probably do that and it would not be a major process to try and sell that; the budget and size of the team is a lot smaller in women’s golf,” Mosley said.
And although it would have been the cheaper and easier option, once again the anticipated interest and support and possibility of student involvement helped kick women’s soccer ahead of women’s golf.
“The interest level is a lot bigger in women’s soccer right now, so we felt like that was a natural fit,” Mosley said.
From softball to soccer
New head soccer coach Casey Wilson’s move from a softball coach to a soccer coach was not a difficult or long one – his new office is only two doors down the hall from where he used to coach. Wilson was ACU’s assistant softball coach and worked with wife and head coach Chantiel Wilson.
“I’ve seen enough women’s Division II games to get an idea at the talent level,” Wilson said.
And Wilson has been in both roles of a NCAA Division II team.
Wilson played two seasons of baseball for ACU in 1998 and ’99 and was place kicker for the ACU football team.
And although he didn’t play soccer at the collegiate level, soccer has always been his first love.
“When I was playing sports in high school, my ticket sports were baseball and football, but I enjoyed playing soccer more because it allowed me to express myself,” Wilson said.
Wilson was a two-year soccer letter-winner, a two-time all-conference player at Canyon High School in Anaheim Hills, Calif., an all-American place kicker at Santa Ana College and set a school record for PATs at Central Michigan University.
“I was close enough; I was a place kicker,” Wilson said jokingly.
One advantage Wilson has to help him build the program has been assistant coach Thomas Pertuit. Unlike Wilson, Pertuit did play soccer beyond high school at the Division II school Montana State-Billings and was assistant coach for the men’s team at Billings.
Two things Pertuit doesn’t have experience in, though, is building a program from the ground up and coaching women.
“It’s been fun learning how to do it,” Pertuit said. “It’d be nice if it was an already established program, but I think when you see what it takes to build a program it makes you better as a person and a coach.”
Despite his inexperience, the transition from coaching men to women has not been hard for Pertuit.
“Sometimes people say guys can be more competitive,” he said. “For me it’s just coaching soccer for people that want to play soccer, and that’s fun for me; that’s what I love.”
Men or women, Pertuit said he is most excited about being able to put together a team that can create its own legacy.
“When you start from scratch you can establish where the bar can be set,” Pertuit said.
Getting all the pieces
To start a new program in a competitive Division II conference like the Lone Star Conference, ACU needed three things: players, a field and money.
ACU now has all three.
Wilson signed seven players to national letters of intent Feb. 8; the women will play their home games on the old intramural field between Wells field and Edwards residence hall, and Mosley said the team will have a $40,000 operating budget.
The seven women signed will combine with a group of women that have already been practicing to make up a roster of more than 25 players. A squad Wilson is confident will be competitive in its first year.
“We feel pretty optimistic about what we have,” Wilson said.
The field, though, was the second option behind Shotwell Stadium.
“Initially, thoughts were to try and play home matches at Shotwell just because they have the turf,” Mosley said.
Shotwell is already the current home for the ACU football team, but because of a scheduling conflict, Mosley chose to keep the games on campus.
“We’d really like to get the intramural field in good shape so we can play our home matches on campus,” Mosley said.
The field already has a new scoreboard and will be conditioned before the season starts in fall 2007, but Mosley said no additional seating would be built for spectators.
“It will just be a neat environment for students to bring out lawn chairs or blankets,” Mosley said. “A lot of soccer facilities at our level are very similar to what we already have at our intramural fields.”
In addition to the $40,000, Wilson will have three full scholarships the first year. Wilson said he plans on splitting those funds between his signing class. The amount of the scholarships will be released at the end of the spring semester.
The LSC limit for scholarships in women’s soccer is 9.9.
The ACU advantage
Wilson ran into two types of prospective players when he was recruiting for the new women’s soccer team: women that were intrigued by the chance to help build a new program and women that didn’t want anything to do with an unestablished team.
“When I’m talking to somebody about our program starting up, I can get a vibe right away,” Wilson said.
One thing Wilson’s had as an advantage, though, was being at ACU.
“I really honestly feel if this was a different university, like a state school that didn’t have the ACU appeal, it would have been much more difficult to get the players we got,” Wilson said.
And although Wilson was limited by the small number of scholarships he had to work with and the hurdle of being a new program, he said the ACU advantage made it easier to recruit.
“I would say it’s easier not easy,” Wilson said. “I know that there are other schools that have soccer that are pretty new. ACU is the only private school in the entire conference and it has an appeal that goes around the country.”
Wilson also found players that were already at ACU interested in playing for him, and the number kept growing as the season approached.
“We had eight that tried out last spring, and we kept having new girls every week,” Wilson said.
And with the combination of women already here and women coming in August, Wilson said he is confident that ACU has a shot in its first year and will continue to grow.
“We feel pretty optimistic about what we have, and I think it’s only going to get better every year,” Wilson said.
Rumors were finally dispelled when ACU added a women’s soccer team.
Regardless if the program is successful in its first season, women’s soccer isn’t going to disappear from ACU anytime soon.
“The program’s here to stay,” Mosley said.
