[oldalum]

These were pretty dramatic lineup changes. Wesley played left back her freshman year on the championship team, so at least she has some good experience at it. We've been getting almost nothing offensively from our outside backs, who on prior teams used to range far downfield and be a primary component of our offense. But I feel for Aikey, who played last year in the midfield, started this year for a few games as a forward, returned to midfield, and now is a center back? Seems like we have too many holes in the dike and too few fingers to fill them, so every fix exposes a different problem. I've thought all season that we're a really good but not top-5 team: we do fine against most teams but have problems matching the scoring power of the very top teams that we'll have to play to go deep into the NCAAs. UCLA is the only team in the D1 committee's latest top 16 reveal that we've played; we tied #23 USC and receiving-votes Georgetown and beat #25 Duke in our best win of the year, which was very early. We've actually been fine defensively scoring-wise all year (9 shutouts, 9 1-goal games, never gave up 2 or more goals) but we're more challenged scoring, hence the 4 scoreless or 1-goal ties. I think the lineup shuffles reflect Ratcliffe trying to find some combination of players and positions that works best as a whole, and he hasn't found it. I think this is because we're still in a rebuilding phase with an unusually young team: against UCLA, in the field we started 8 frosh and sophomores along with 2 upperclassmen, and of the 3 subs who played appreciable minutes, 2 were frosh. I hope it all works out well this year, but I'm really looking forward to the next 2 years!

[oldalum]

These were pretty dramatic lineup changes. Wesley played left back her freshman year on the championship team, so at least she has some good experience at it. We've been getting almost nothing offensively from our outside backs, who on prior teams used to range far downfield and be a primary component of our offense. But I feel for Aikey, who played last year in the midfield, started this year for a few games as a forward, returned to midfield, and now is a center back? Seems like we have too many holes in the dike and too few fingers to fill them, so every fix exposes a different problem. I've thought all season that we're a really good but not top-5 team: we do fine against most teams but have problems matching the scoring power of the very top teams that we'll have to play to go deep into the NCAAs. UCLA is the only team in the D1 committee's latest top 16 reveal that we've played; we tied #23 USC and receiving-votes Georgetown and beat #25 Duke in our best win of the year, which was very early. We've actually been fine defensively scoring-wise all year (9 shutouts, 9 1-goal games, never gave up 2 or more goals) but we're more challenged scoring, hence the 4 scoreless or 1-goal ties. I think the lineup shuffles reflect Ratcliffe trying to find some combination of players and positions that works best as a whole, and he hasn't found it. I think this is because we're still in a rebuilding phase with an unusually young team: against UCLA, in the field we started 8 frosh and sophomores along with 2 upperclassmen, and of the 3 subs who played appreciable minutes, 2 were frosh. I hope it all works out well this year, but I'm really looking forward to the next 2 years!