Coach Aaron Rodgers has high hopes for the 2016 season.
In his third year with Ohio soccer, coach Aaron Rodgers wanted change.
Rodgers switched from a traditional 4-4-2 formation to a more aggressive, attacking 4-3-3 formation.
The change was a challenge for his team. Rodgers was still working on his first true recruiting class, and he had a lot of freshmen to work with.
This year, his fourth, he won’t have that problem. Rodgers has most of his team returning and a new assistant coach, Debs Brereton.
“She was the right hire at the right time to bring a different dimension and really ratchet up our coaching,” Rodgers said of Brereton. “She’s the right person at the right time to help take us to the next level that we are ready to go to.”
Rodgers said she's familiar with the 4-3-3 formation and even works with the 4-2-3-1, a less attacking approach.
It will be an easy transition between the two formations for Rodgers. He said he will generally start out in a 4-3-3 and, depending on how much his wingers retreat when they are on defense, will turn them into outside attacking midfielders.
He predicts the new formation will help his team because he wants to play a counter-attacking style. Rodgers said he doesn’t want his team to play direct with a lot of long balls upfield; he wants his team to counter the opposition using quick passes and dissecting defenses that way.
“We have to put the players in the environment in training where they can make those decisions,” Rodgers said. “Unlike football or basketball, which are a coach’s sport, soccer is so much of a player sport and (the players) have to know how to make those decisions and be able to read cues to make the right decision.”
Though this is what Rodgers wants tactically from his team for the 2016 season, he will be missing a key scorer in his lineup.
Stephanie Rowland will be unavailable to the team in 2016 after she battled with injuries throughout 2015. Rodgers said she was not 100 percent for a lot of last season, and the trainers knew she was going to need surgery to heal her hip. She missed all of the spring season as a result.
“I have faith in all of our players,” Rodgers said. “Granted, it’s always going to be difficult losing your leading goal scorer.”
But Rodgers isn’t worried too much, because he has some current and incoming talent that will help fill that void.
He has Alexis Milesky returning for her senior year in addition to the new personnel. Rodgers said he's looking for Milesky to play as a winger.
He said, with the exception to his left back, his backline will remain the same — Celeste Fushimi-Karns, Rianna Reese and Mandy Arnzen.
A position Rodgers is uncertain about, however, is goalkeeper.
All last season, Taylor Smith, Erin Beurket and Vanessa Cordoba rotated throughout the season. Through the spring session, there was still some question because all three goalies played equal time through five games.
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Smith, then a freshman, played the most during last season, so she could be the favorite going into Ohio’s exhibition game against Northern Kentucky in August, although nothing is official.
For Rodgers, last season was about trying something new. This season’s about molding everything the team learned in the spring and finish mid-table to go to the Mid-American Conference Tournament for the first time in three years.
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