With a Pac-12 three-peat on the line this season, the UCLA men’s soccer players think that the chinks in the armor that popped up throughout non-conference play have all been fixed so the team can withstand the challenges of Pac-12 conference play.
A Saturday noon game at Drake Stadium against San Diego State will mark the official beginning of the quest for three straight Pac-12 championships, but the team still has a bitter taste in its mouth from early losses to unranked Cal Poly and UC Irvine.
The season began auspiciously for No. 10 UCLA as the Bruins took down the defending NCAA national champion Indiana in overtime, but then the team began its cycle of ups and downs.
With the Bruins trying to integrate a number of talented freshmen, they have struggled to find their rhythm and identity early on.
“The early season is always tough, just getting into a team and everything,” said freshman forward/midfielder Gage Zerboni. “But I think we’re finally coming together as one, working together to achieve what we want to achieve this year.”
Despite a couple of losses, UCLA (5-2-1) has found and established its most effective offensive weapons. Junior midfielder Leo Stolz leads the team with five goals and senior forward Victor Chavez is keeping pace with three goals of his own.
If the Bruins hope to defend the Pac-12 crown, other players will have to step up on offense to complement the two-headed attacking duo. Senior midfielder Victor Munoz and sophomore midfielder Jordan Vale seemed to have woken up in the final game of nonconference play, both knocking in their first goals of the season in the 3-0 win over UC Riverside.
“The first half of the season so far we couldn’t even score,” said redshirt senior midfielder Ryan Lee. “But Jordan and Victor scored the other game, and those are some of our best attacking players, so it’s good that they’re finally getting on the board and getting on the stat sheet; hopefully this gives them confidence because the first goal is always the hardest.”
With the offense seemingly having found its groove, coach Jorge Salcedo still expressed concerns for his defense. Salcedo said that he hopes he can find consistency with his lineups, especially in his four-player defending backline, to fortify the defense in front of redshirt junior goalkeeper Earl Edwards.
“I think a lot of the struggle is just the lack of continuity that we’ve been able to have in the starting team and in our back four,” Salcedo said. “We’ve had a lot of issues in terms of putting out the same team; I don’t think we’ve started the same team once this season in our first six matches because of injuries and red cards.”
If injuries and red cards do remain issues, the Bruins will have to deal with them while navigating a more competitive than normal Pac-12 conference, with No. 1 California and No. 3 Washington both ahead of UCLA in the rankings.
“We do kind of have a target on our back because we won the past few years,” Lee said. “Pac-12’s looking a lot better than it has in recent years, but with our past couple of games, I think we look good enough that if we play close to our full potential, we’ll be all right.”