Men’s Soccer Looking To Capture Backyard Championship

There have been only a few times in NC State’s history that an athletics program has had such a meteoric rise. Led by second-year head coach Marc Hubbard, NC State’s No. 15 men’s soccer team will play Saint Louis at First Horizon Stadium at WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary.

The Wolfpack advanced to Friday’s game with a 3-2 upset victory over Georgetown last weekend on the Hoyas’ home field.

It’s just the second time in school history and the first time in 35 years that the Pack has advanced to collegiate soccer’s final four teams. In 1990, head coach George Tarantini’s squad lost to eventual national champion UCLA in a semifinal game played in Tampa, Florida.

Both Friday’s semifinals and Monday night’s championship game will be televised nationally on ESPN. Washington will face No. 16 Furman in the 6 p.m. contest, followed by No. 15 NC State against Saint Louis.

It will be a rare opportunity for the Wolfpack to win a national title in its own backyard, a feat accomplished only by the 1974 men’s basketball team when it won two games in the NCAA East Regional championship at Reynolds Coliseum before traveling to nearby Greensboro to beat seven-time defending champion UCLA in the semifinals and Marquette in the championship game at Greensboro Coliseum.

“It will be nice to be here in Raleigh, to get out of our NCAA hotel obligations and stay in our own beds,” Hubbard says.

In 1988, the Wolfpack women’s soccer team, led by All-America forward Laura Kerrigan, beat UNC-Chapel Hill in the inaugural ACC championship but then lost to the Tar Heels in the NCAA title game. Both events were played at the Wolfpack’s own Method Road Soccer Stadium in Raleigh. The following year, the Wolfpack lost to the Tar Heels in the national semifinals played at UNC-CH’s Fetzer Field.

Hubbard, hired from New Hampshire in December 2023, could match the feat of women’s cross-country leader Tom Jones as the shortest-tenured NC State coach to win a national title if his Wolfpack squad wins its next two games. Jones, in his second season, led the women’s cross-country team to back-to-back Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women championships in 1989-90.

Sam Esposito took his second Wolfpack baseball team to the 1968 College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, where it finished third overall. Third-year men’s basketball coach Jim Valvano guided the Wolfpack to the 1983 ACC and NCAA championships.

“Our whole program is built around having fun,” Hubbard says. “Scoring goals and winning games is fun, so every day is built around that.”

This year’s Wolfpack has both one of the highest-scoring offenses and stingiest defenses in college soccer, a combination that put them in position to win the school’s third national championship of the fall semester. Last month, the women’s cross-country team won its fourth NCAA title in the last five years, and the women’s tennis tandem of Gabriella Broadfoot and Victoria Osuigwe won the school’s second NCAA doubles title.

Since 1974, NC State has won national titles in men’s basketball (1974 and ’83) and women’s cross-country (1979-80, 2021, ’22, ’23 and ’25), as well as multiple doubles and relay titles and dozens of individual championships.

Soccer, however, has only been on the national stage a few times since the sport was first introduced on campus with a faculty-vs.-students friendly match on Jan. 6, 1923, organized by British-born textiles department chair Thomas Nelson at Riddick Stadium. The 46-year-old Nelson — a native of Preston, England, and chair of the faculty athletics committee — scored one of the faculty’s two goals in the match, while physical education instructor and track coach Carl C. Taylor scored the faculty’s other goal. Student James L. McNamara scored both of the students’ goals in the 2-2 tie.

Soccer became a varsity sport at NC State in 1949, thanks to a roster of walk-ons made up mostly of international students coached by Eric DeGroat. The first rosters of the varsity and junior varsity teams were populated with players from Mexico, Greece, Cuba, Colombia, Iraq, Norway, Italy, India, Costa Rica, Brazil and Guatemala, mixed with a couple of natives of Wake and Johnston counties.

In its first three decades, the varsity program was coached by five different instructors from the school’s physical education department, starting with DeGroat and followed by John Kenfield, Bill Leonhardt, Nellie Cooper and Max Rhodes. Four of the first five coaches, however, had overall losing records.

The program reached its glory years in the 1980s and ’90s under its first full-time coach, Larry Gross, and then under Argentinian-born George Tarantini. With scoring leaders like Nigeria’s Sam Okpodu and Sam Owoh and Uruguay-born Tab Ramos, the Wolfpack became known for its speedy, attacking style under Tarantini.

They have some guys who are the best players at their positions I’ve seen this year in college soccer.

Late in the 1980s, the high-scoring Pack competed at the top of national college soccer, as evidenced by 1990’s appearance in the national semifinals and 1992’s appearance in the national quarterfinals.

The leader of the ’90 team was two-time ACC Player of the Year and All-America forward Henry Gutierrez, a member of the NC State Athletic Hall of Fame who still lives in the Raleigh area and is one of the current team’s biggest advocates.

“I don’t think this season is a surprise to anyone,” he says. “Marc Hubbard and his coaching staff have done a very good job of using their resources and have been meticulous in putting together a team that plays well together, is cohesive and most of all resilient.

“They have some guys who are the best players at their positions I’ve seen this year in college soccer.”

The Wolfpack’s strength is down the middle, with goalkeeper Logan Erb, center back Nikola Markovic and forward Donovan Phillip, all signed by Hubbard shortly after he became head coach.

Raleigh native Curt Johnson (’91), the current general manager of the Denver Summit Football Club of the National Women’s Soccer League and senior captain of NC State’s 1990 squad, has also followed the program’s electric rise over the last two years.

“This team has everyone watching as they break records and earn the attention of college soccer and beyond,” Johnson says. “We soccer alums love how hard they play for one another, the soccer program and the university.

“They are capable of winning in so many different ways and at the same time have incredible spirit, resilience and fight when things aren’t going their way. The students and Wolfpack fans have generated the best game-day atmosphere I’ve seen.”

Many of those raucous fans — known on campus as the Red Terrors Soccer Support Club — will be on hand to see if the Wolfpack can advance to the national title game for the first time in school history.

“They definitely live up to that nickname,” Erb says.