By Matthew Hart, Amherst Assistant Sports Information Director
The first came on a blind redirection during a 5-1 blowout, the third on a surprising penalty kick 19 matches into the season. The second was a 20-yard equalizer from an All-American in the second half of a rivalry contest.
Three goals allowed in 20 games.
Many coaches talk about perfection. Few come as close to truly
achieving it as Justin Serpone’s Amherst College men’s
soccer team did during the fall of 2012.
We’ll let the facts speak first. Undefeated at 17-0-3, having
never trailed in a match. Two 0-0 ties with archrival Williams and
a 1-1 draw with Wesleyan. A 56-3 goal differential and 17 shutouts.
The nation’s greatest defense and the best season of goal
prevention in NCAA history, regardless of division.
No, the Lord Jeffs did not win a national title. Thanks to a wild
penalty-kick epic with Williams, they did not even reach the Final
Four, despite ending the year alongside eventual champion Messiah
as the only unbeaten squads in America.
But the end results will carry none of the lasting meaning of
the process that created them. In the Amherst system, no single
trophy, no final score will compare to the daily ritual of hard
work and camaraderie aimed at attaining the words printed on the
team’s purple and gray warm-ups: “Win the
Moment.”
“All we care about is winning the next game,” said
Serpone, taking a rare half hour out of his busy recruiting
schedule to look back instead of forward. “And maybe
that’s cliché, but it’s the honest-to-God truth.
There wasn’t a game that I went into this year where I
thought, ‘we’re going to win today.’ We won three
games 6-0 this year, but every time I thought, ‘if we
don’t do X, Y and Z, we could lose today.’”
For the casual fan, such an outlook – not to mention
Serpone’s ever-manic sideline behavior – might smack of
paranoia or downright lunacy. But for those who were lucky enough
to follow the tale of the 2012 Jeffs from beginning to crushing
end, it was that rigid attention to detail that made the
team’s story truly historic.
I. Achieving the Goal
When the Lord Jeffs gathered in August, leaving hometowns ranging
from California to Venezuela to South Korea, they were met with
Serpone’s one season-long goal: win the NESCAC Championship.
This year, they would be defending their 2011 title and seeking to
become the first back-to-back winner since 2004 in a league which
might as well stand for New England Super Competitive Athletic
Conference.
“The only long-term goal we have at the beginning of the year
is to win a NESCAC Championship,” said Serpone.
“National championships, all that – there are a lot of
things that go into that equation. That can’t be a goal. But
a realistic goal, we think, is to win a NESCAC Championship every
year.”
With four All-Conference standouts – including league Player
of the Year Spencer Noon ’13 – returning from the 2011
squad, Serpone knew the talent was in place for a repeat. Still, it
would take time for the group to hone its winning mindset.
“It’s organic, it evolves,” he said. “You
don’t know who you’re going to be on day one, but
somewhere it evolves into this group that believes and works hard
and does all the little things right.”
From the get-go, the Jeffs were doing plenty of right as they
started 8-0, outscoring opponents 30-1 over the opening month. The
only blemish came in the midst of a 5-1 rout of
Hamilton when the Continentals’ Brian Whitson scored on
a fortuitous redirection off his heel, tallying the only goal
Amherst would allow until its penultimate regular-season contest.
But despite the fast start and a No. 2 national ranking, the team
remained focused on the task at hand.
“We’re a program that’s very
process-oriented,” said Serpone. “That’s the way
the kids approach it and that’s the crux of what makes it
special. They respect the game of soccer, they respect the other
teams we play, and they know that if they don’t bring their
best, in this sport, you can lose any game.”
While the defense continued to dominate, the offense suffered its
first hiccup on Oct. 6, failing to score despite a 25-9 shot
advantage as Amherst battled 17th-ranked Williams to a draw at
home. Tying their archrival for the third consecutive time,
the Jeffs and Ephs each walked away from the contest with
undefeated records intact and Serpone allowed himself a prophetic
moment as he addressed the team postgame, promising the squad that
they’d see Williams again in a month.
Three days after the disappointing tie, Amherst rebounded in
emphatic fashion, posting a 6-0 thrashing of a Trinity side that
entered the match 5-1-3 as Noon became the first player in program
history to tally 100 points. Shutouts of Colby and
Bowdoin followed as the Jeff defense and first-year keeper Thomas
Bull took a miniscule 0.08 goals-against average into the final
weekend of the regular season, having posted 11 clean sheets in 12
outings.
You hear it all the time in sports: in a rivalry game, the numbers
go out the window. For the second time in 2012 – and not the
last – the adage held true when Amherst met Little Three foe
Wesleyan on Oct. 20. Noon put the Jeffs ahead just before halftime,
but All-American forward Rory O’Neill equalized on an
impressive 20-yard volley in the 66th minute and Cardinal goalie
Adam Purdy made a career-high 10 saves as Amherst settled for its
second draw of the year despite another massive shot advantage
(29-12).
The Jeffs would only have to wait two weeks for another shot at
Wesleyan, however. After ending the regular season with a 3-0 win
at Connecticut College and dismantling Middlebury, 4-0, in the
conference quarterfinals, Amherst drew the Cardinals for the
semifinals on Nov. 3. But in the postseason’s first twist of
fate, the team would be traveling to Williamstown for the tilt, as
a coin flip had given Williams top seed following a regular season
in which the Jeffs and Ephs finished with identical conference
results.
Seeding aside, there was no doubt as to the conference’s
dominant team come semifinal Saturday. After Williams required
penalty kicks to get past upset-minded Tufts in the day’s
opener, the Amherst backline put on yet another clinic against
Wesleyan, surrendering just seven shots (two on net) as Max Fikke
’14 provided the offense in a 1-0 win.
And so the stage was set for Amherst-Williams, Part II. One win
away from its stated goal, the Jeffs wasted no time in doing what
they couldn’t in October. Chris Lerner ’13 bent a long
cross into the box in the second minute, setting up a dazzling Jae
Heo ’14 header that set the mood.
“I felt in the locker room before that game that we weren’t going to lose,” said Serpone. “We scored in the second minute and from there it felt like we had a handle on the game all the way through. It was a special day.”
With James Mooney ’13E tapping in a Gabriel Wirz ’15
header later in the first period and the backline anchored by
Lerner and Julien Aoyama ’14 continuing to dominate its half,
the Jeffs fended off Williams’ late attacks and rushed the
field in the closing seconds, champions once again after another
shutout. For the seniors, it was the first win over Williams in
four years. For Serpone – as well as Heo and Mooney, who
arrived in 2008 before missing seasons – it was a third
conference title in five. For each team member, it would be the
climax to a fall full of winning moments.
But it was not the end of the story.
II. The One-Game Season
Qualifying for the NCAA Tournament was nothing new. In six years
under Serpone, the program had never not qualified. But 2012 was a
different beast: for the first time since 2007 – before even
Mooney and Heo were around – the Jeffs had earned a
first-round bye as the nation’s second-ranked team.
And while there were seven free passes handed out in
Serpone’s debut season, in 2012 there were only two. One to
Amherst, one to the perennial powerhouses of Division III, Messiah
College of Pennsylvania.
Heading into a national tournament, Serpone’s sides had never
yielded fewer than eight goals nor carried a zero in their loss
column. This year, perched atop an entire half of the bracket, the
undefeated Jeffs had outscored their opponents 50-2 in 17 matches.
They would be playing as favorites until the national title game if
they made it that far, but don’t think for a minute that they
were looking ahead.
“Now you have a one-game season coming up,” said
Serpone, recalling his message to the team at the time. “The
easy thing for me to say is, ‘some of these seniors are
playing their last game today.’ That’ll refocus you
pretty quickly, because you want to keep playing, to keep building
your resume to be special as a team. And you don’t have time
to mess around, because you’re playing a team like
Dickinson.”
Ranked No. 13 earlier in the fall and with their only losses
coming to other NCAA tournament-bound squads, the Dickinson College
Red Devils made the six-hour drive from Central Pennsylvania to
Amherst deservedly confident in their ability to pull off a
second-round upset. Such a result seemed entirely possible for 63
minutes on Sunday, Nov. 11 as Amherst led just 1-0 on Fikke’s
first-half tally and dodged a huge bullet in the 57th when
Dickinson’s sparkplug midfielder Jamie Martin sent a
beautiful through ball to an open Nicolas Tierno. The clean chance
flew wide, however, and like any dominant team, Amherst capitalized
on their opponent’s mistake, opening the floodgates in the
64th and cruising to a 4-0 win as Noon struck twice and Greg Singer
’16 blasted a beauty from the top of the 18, all within a
span of eight and a half minutes.
Hurdle one, crossed. With a single win, the Jeffs were headed
to their third consecutive Sweet 16 and fifth in six years. But now
the hill would get steeper, and history was against them in the
form of a 1-3 record in sectional semifinal games under
Serpone.
Yet with all of their attention on the upcoming Swarthmore match,
you still couldn’t help but notice them. When the bracket was
first released, you couldn’t help but notice them. There they
were, sitting at the bottom of Amherst’s
section: the Ephs. And when they scored with 10
minutes left in regulation and again in overtime for a 2-1
second-round win in a match dominated by St. Lawrence, a third
Amherst-Williams clash seemed almost inevitable.
But first came Saturday. For the second straight weekend, the Jeffs
would square off with a talented squad from soccer-rich
Pennsylvania’s Centennial Conference. Undefeated in league
play, Swarthmore had lost only to fellow Sweet 16 qualifier Stevens
(N.J.) in September and rival Haverford in the conference
championship. After a pair of 3-0 wins in the opening rounds, the
Garnet could hardly be taken for granted. Williams, meanwhile,
would need to get past a two-loss Brandeis side riding the wave of
a last-minute winner against Vassar in the second round.
As the Ephs walked onto Amherst’s Hitchcock Field to warm up
on for the day’s opening match, one player said to the team,
“our field, all weekend.” The bold statement seemed far
from accurate at first, as a back-and-forth battle saw Brandeis
generate the better first-half chances. But it was the Ephs’
dynamic duo that would prove to be the difference as NESCAC Rookie
of the Year Mohammed Rashid found Patrick Ebobisse for the
game’s lone goal in the 64th minute. After three one-goal
wins, the Ephs had punched their ticket for a rematch. Now Amherst
had to do its part.
Reflecting on his senior class, Serpone said of Noon, “Every
game Spencer went out there, he thought he was going to score a
goal and be the margin of victory. More often than not, it
happened.”
One win away from a third date with Williams, Amherst’s star
striker rose to the occasion yet again, first sending a pinpoint
corner to the accurate head of Wirz for a late first-half goal,
then wrestling away possession from the Swarthmore defense and
finishing a low rocket in the second. It was all the Jeffs would
need as the Garnet’s only shot on goal came on a successful
penalty kick from Noah Sterngold in the 63rd minute.
The 2-1 win broke Amherst’s run of five straight shutouts,
but if you doubt the dominance of Amherst’s defense, look
again. Against the Jeff backline, a 16-2-2 Garnet side that had
scored three times in each of the first two rounds managed just a
single shot on target, and it came on a penalty kick.
Another stifling defensive effort. More Noon offense. The beat went
on, on to the irresistible third matchup between a college founded
in 1793 and the offshoot institution that had relocated in the
fertile Connecticut River Valley 28 years later.
III. The Unthinkable
An instant classic. The greatest game I’ve ever seen. The
Soccer Gods. Karma.
You might hear those phrases tossed around by neutral observers or
Eph faithful who witnessed the third Amherst-Williams meeting of
2012.
But for the Lord Jeff side, it was simply the unthinkable. Not
necessarily the result, but the shocking course of events which
accounted for it. To borrow a phrase from a different sport’s
NCAA lore, it was no less than Heartbreak City.
If this is your first time reading about the game, it was,
undoubtedly, one for the ages. Just as they had in October, the
rivals played 110 scoreless minutes on Hitchcock Field. Just as
they had in October, the Jeffs tallied 16 more shots than the Ephs
but none found the back of the net.
But unlike their regular season matchup, and certainly unlike the
NESCAC final two weeks prior, fate dealt Amherst the cruelest of
hands in the national quarterfinals.
Five – five – Jeff shots ricocheted
off the crossbar during the match. Several more of their 23
attempts were nearly as close. Yet after 90 minutes of regulation
and two ten-minute overtimes, a Williams defense starting a pair of
first-years at outside back somehow kept Amherst and its relentless
direct approach off the board. The near-misses play back like the
hard-knocks montage in a Rocky film.
Third minute: Lerner directs a long header into the
box. Milton Rico ’15 wins it out of the air and sends it to
Heo. The junior, who buried Williams just over a minute into the
match two weeks ago, tees up an open look and watches it carom off
the woodwork and fly high.
20th minute: Noon slips through the Eph defenders and
appears headed for a breakaway, but is dropped from behind by an
aggressive but apparently clean tackle from Dan Lima.
42nd minute: Not one, but two Amherst chances find
the bar as Aoyama blasts one from the top of the box only to have
it carom straight back to Rico just feet away. The sophomore
collects, fires and the crossbar’s clang fills the air
seconds after its first bellowing as the teams enter halftime
scoreless.
62nd minute: Lerner sends a trademark long throw into
the middle of the box and Noon wins it for a clean header, only to
be denied by the woodwork yet again.
89th minute: After Williams misses on its first
serious threat with User Kushaina tapping one just inches wide in
the previous minute, Amherst surges forward in the final push of
regulation. After a chaotic scramble near the top of the box, the
ball falls back ten yards to Wirz, who meets it beautifully for a
twisting blast on target that seems destined for glory. But Than
Finan ’13, having already made a pair of strong stops earlier
in the half, turns in the decisive save, rising to tip the ball
over the net and send the battle onward.
First overtime: After Williams becomes an unlikely
aggressor, missing on three chances as Bull makes his only two
saves of the match, Aoyama is robbed for the second time, with
Singer finding him at the top of the 18 for a gorgeous shot that
just catches the woodwork.
Second overtime: In a final effort, Lerner heaves
another long throw toward the box, finding Singer, who flips a
nifty pass over his head for Heo, but the junior’s shot from
a tough angle flies just wide of the right post.
And so it went to penalties, 110 minutes of exhausting team play
meaningless in determining who would advance to San Antonio, a
beautiful behemoth of a game doomed to be decided by individual
efforts. The Ephs had already played seven overtime matches on the
year – five going the full 110 – and beaten Tufts on
PKs back in the NESCAC semifinals. Amherst hadn’t been to a
shootout since the 2010 Sweet 16 as the Jeffs’ juniors and
seniors fended off memories of another NESCAC rival, Bowdoin,
advancing past them in that contest, 3-1.
It would take five rounds this time, as Finan and Bull each made
impressive saves to begin. But in perhaps the most torturing twist
on an already agonizing day, Aoyama, the soon-to-be-named national
Defender of the Year, the model teammate whose prowess at outside
back was perhaps the most instrumental key to the Jeffs’
success, misfired in the third round.
When Ebobisse slotted the fifth-round winner moments later, the
devastation was complete. The penalty-takers crumpled at midfield.
Their teammates stared in shock from the far bench. There would be
no Final Four, no dream matchup with Messiah. It was over right
there on their home pitch, between two white goals that had
seemingly turned against them for the first time.
“We didn’t score and that’s why we didn’t
advance,” summed up Serpone.
But through all the crossbar robberies and dashed chances, they had kept confident, and even once the Ephs had rushed the field in disbelieving joy, it didn’t quite seem real.
“We just thought, ‘keep doing what you’re
doing. It’s coming,’” Serpone recalled. “I
thought that all the way until the last penalty kick went in. I
thought, ‘this team deserves this too much.’ We did
everything right and a bunch of times it came pretty damn close,
but some things you can’t conceptualize. You try your hardest
and then – to heck with it.
“If the worst thing that happens to us is that we lose a
soccer game, individually we’re going to be okay. As a team,
our heart is broken, but there’s some poetry in the fact
that that’s how this team lost, because we
went out and we played as hard as we could play. We did everything
but put the ball in the back of the goal. It took PKs to take us
down. It took a team getting a little bit lucky to take us down,
and there’s some grace in that.”
IV. One for the Record Books
Once the bitter taste of it all had begun to subside, once Williams
had bowed out in the national semifinals to an Ohio Northern side
that Messiah would crush, 5-1, in the final, the remarkable
achievements of the 2012 Lord Jeffs shone on.
Individually, the awards piled up like Thanksgiving leftovers.
All-NESCAC for Lerner, Noon, Aoyama and Heo; Academic All-America
for Noon; First Team All-America from the NSCAA for both Aoyama and
Noon, All-Region for Lerner, Heo and Mooney; D3soccer.com
All-America for the pillars of the defense in Aoyama and Lerner and
the Defender of the Year award for the junior who had delivered
tear-stained apologies to his teammates after the missed penalty a
month earlier.
Above those accolades, however, rose the accomplishments of a
nine-person senior class that posted a gaudy 58-8-10 record over
four years, winning two conference titles and going 7-2-2 in NCAA
Tournament play.
It was the same group that lost 4-1 to Connecticut College four
matches into its first season; the same group that advanced to the
Sweet 16 the next fall when Mooney scored a hat trick against host
St. Lawrence in the second round; the same group that didn’t
lose until the final day of the regular season in 2011 before
winning a NESCAC title in front of its home fans. For Serpone, 2012
was icing on an already-baked cake.
“It really felt like a culmination in a lot of ways for this
particular senior class,” he said. “They came in as
first-years and they were an important group. We had just graduated
a Final Four team that was very upperclassmen-heavy, so we needed
these first-years to play. Over four years we got scarred, we got
beat up, we learned, we grew, and this year was a culmination of
all that.”
It was a group captained by Noon, the greatest finisher in the
program’s history, and Lerner, the heart and soul of the
greatest defense Amherst has ever seen.
“I said to the guys their freshman year,” Serpone
recalled, “‘What this program needs at some point is a
Tom Brady, a guy that wants to be the center of attention, wants to
lead, wants to put this team on their back, wants to be responsible
for winning. Spence texted me a couple of weeks ago and said,
‘Coach, maybe I wasn’t Tom Brady exactly, but I tried
my hardest.’”
From jubilant goal celebrations to shouldering the blame after his
missed penalty kick handed the Jeffs their first loss of 2011, Noon
never shied from the spotlight. Finishing his career as the
program’s all-time points (117) and goals (49) leader, he
walked the walk every step of the way.
Lerner, meanwhile, was the undisputed anchor of the team both on
and off the pitch. Whether shutting down opponents on the wing,
effectively turning throw-ins into corners, or picking up cones
after practice, his commitment impressed anyone who witnessed
it.
“Chris Lerner is as impressive a human being as I’ve
ever been around, and that’s not just among kids I’ve
coached,” Serpone said flatly. “People thought he was
too small, people thought he wasn’t technical enough, and he
just decided at some point, ‘I’m going to be a great
player.’ Soccer’s the smaller part of it, because off
the field, here’s a kid that can be trusted to do everything.
Every single guy on our team looks to him. We joked around that we
should have bracelets that say ‘WWCD.’”
And then there was Mooney, the old man of the group and another
captain, who came back after missing 2011 with an injury to score
five goals during an All-Region senior season.
“He got hurt, was disappointed, and taught me a
lesson,” Serpone recalled. “He said to me that he
wanted to come back and be a part of a special season. He’s
going to be a doctor, he’s going to med school next year, but
he cared so much that he put the group ahead of his own timeline
and his own life because he believed so much in it. For James, it
wasn’t necessarily about playing time or scoring goals or any
of that. It was about winning.”
For anyone who watched the Jeffs over the last four years, it was
also impossible to overlook Alejandro and Federico Sucre. And while
the former earned captaincy after an All-NESCAC junior season, it
was the latter that shone in 2012, starting at midfield and scoring
five times as the team overcame the loss of his brother to injury
nine games into the season.
“The lasting image I’ll have of this season was after
the NESCAC Championship, Fede couldn’t even celebrate,”
Serpone said. “He had his head down in the corner of the
locker room because he was so spent, and that says everything about
Fede.”
“My heart breaks for Ale to have gotten injured this
year,” he added. “For most people, that would be a
death sentence, but he was basically a part of our coaching staff
for the time that he was out. He tried so hard to get back, and
that’s his character. You can’t meet anyone on campus
who doesn’t look at Ale or Fede and think what great guys
they are. It just didn’t work out for Ale this year, but
he’s been such a big part of our success over the last four
years, it’s immeasurable.”
While it was Noon, Lerner, Mooney and the Sucres who were regular
leaders between the lines, the examples set by the four other
seniors were equally – if not more – instrumental in
the team’s success.
“Jared Hedglin and Chris Nelson, Casey [McNamara] and Brian Morgan – those guys are really good soccer players,” said Serpone. “On almost every other Division III team, these guys are 90-minute starters, but it was never about that for them. It was about, ‘How do I help us win?’ The first bricks in the foundation of our team are guys on the bench that still care, still work, still bring their energy to practice.”
Statistically, the machine built from that foundation succeeded
unlike any that had come before it, even the 2008 Final Four squad.
The 2012 Jeffs set program records for wins and goals in a season,
but their true backbone was a defense that suffocated teams with a
ruthless efficiency seen rarely at any level of the sport. Amherst
outshot its opponents 407-120 on the year, surrendering an average
of just six shots per game and a miniscule 2.05 attempts on goal.
The team posted shutouts in 85 percent of its matches, easily the
nation’s highest figure and tied for third all-time in the
Division III record book.
But the most forceful number of them all is simply three. Three
goals allowed in 1,860 minutes of soccer.
In 2008, York College of Pennsylvania also posted 17 shutouts over
a 20-game season. The Spartans also allowed just three goals. Like
the 2012 Jeffs, they saw three matches go to double-overtime. They
experienced heartbreak in perhaps an even worse manner than
Amherst, falling on penalties in both the Capital Area Conference
semifinals and the second-round of the NCAA Tournament.
Unlike the Jeffs, however, York’s first overtime affair of
the year was not a 110-minute draw, instead ending with a Spartan
goal just 27 seconds before the final horn. As a result, York
played 27 fewer seconds of soccer in 2008 than Amherst did in 2012.
With no Division I or II teams close, that margin gives the Jeffs
the lowest single-season goals-against average of any team in NCAA
history.
If your standard is the process and not the end result, if you care
about winning every moment before winning every match, that makes
the 2012 Amherst College Lord Jeffs about as close to perfect as
any team has ever come.
