Lynchburg falls short, but stands tall

By Katrina Styx
D3sports.com

The Lynchburg men’s soccer team may have suffered a disappointing loss to Messiah College in the NCAA championship match this year, but their season is nothing to hang their heads over.

“We’re extremely proud,” said coach Chris Yeager. “It couldn’t have happened to a better group of guys.”

The Hornets’ 20-5-1 record this season is a good indicator of the team’s success, but it doesn’t say it all.

The beginning of Lynchburg’s season was a bleak one. The men lost their first game to Methodist, a team they would normally beat, Yeager said. Then tragedy struck the field and claimed the life of a freshman player, Adam Seymour. Seymour collapsed during a practice run, fell unconscious and never woke up again. The team took another hit when senior Cam Smith fractured his leg during a game.

“The season started pretty rough, to be honest,” Yeager said.

So to finish second in the nation is something to be proud of. So how did they do it? Lynchburg may have gone into the NCAA tournament unranked, but they didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. Last year they made it in the first round, but got knocked out on penalty kicks. They’ve won their conference championship two years in a row. And this year they knew they had a solid team coming back.

“We knew we were returning a good group,” Yeager said.

For most of the season, they had one goal: win back-to-back conference championships. That hasn’t happened too often in their conference, Yeager explained, and each team they were up against was tough.

“Even the eighth-place team you’re scared of,” he said.

Once they re-claimed their conference title, the Hornets took it one step at a time.

“We just kept resetting our goals,” Yeager said.

First it was Transylvania, which Lynchburg handled nicely with a 3-1 win. Then it was No. 9 Emory – a team that had beaten Lynchburg earlier in the season. But the Hornets didn’t let history get the better of them, and advanced into the third round of the tournament with a 2-1 win.

“Once we came away from that, we knew we had a special group,” Yeager said.

If this year has taught Yeager anything, it’s that success isn’t a result of a team’s skill.

“I’ve learned that it’s still not about the talent… it’s about the desire,” he said.

That’s exactly what Lynchburg has. One of their best players is “five-foot and nothing,” Yeager said, but works hard enough that he can outplay comparative giants. That level of drive continues through the rest of the team.

“We’re competing for one goal and that’s all they care about,” Yeager said.

Yeager has watched his program develop considerably in the nine years he’s been with Lynchburg. His first few years saw the Hornets winning more games than ever, and for the first time in 2004 they advanced to the conference finals. Two more years put them in the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1982. Last year’s NCAA first round win was the team’s best year yet, until this season. To a certain extent, reaching the championship was just a matter of time.

“As a coach you each year want to get better,” Yeager said.

Yet every year in Division III is a new experience, he said, because every year players graduate or transfer out while new players step up.

“It’s fun to build it, but it’s a culture we try to develop,” Yeager said.

Now it’s time to start thinking about next year, and it could be a completely different story. Yeager said he’s expecting big things out of his returning players, but graduation has taken a good chunk of the team away.

“We graduated a boat load” Yeager said. “We’d like to win a few next year.”