Coaches and athletes on soccer, golf, and volleyball talk about preparing for the upcoming Fall sports season.
Writer: Omar Woods
Sports Editor
As the Fall season rolls in, the athletes and coaches of Winthrop gear up to take on another sports season. Some sports, specifically the women’s soccer team, have already faced off against other schools. Spencer Smith, the head coach of the women’s soccer program, discussed his outlook on this Fall sports season.
“Our focus is to just try to improve each and every year and get better in all areas of the game,” Smith said.
“Right now, we have been working on the attacking things of the game and just trying to create more and better goal-scoring opportunities for ourselves. That’s been the theme for the last week or so.”
Changes in the roster have led to new challenges and opportunities for some sports programs. Men’s soccer has had an influx of new athletes. Daniel Ridenhour, the head coach of the men’s soccer program, discussed the roster change.
“We have seventeen new players, so it’s a large challenge. We’ve got, I think, the most freshmen we’ve had since, I wanna say, 2000 or 2002. I think it’s the second-most freshmen in the history of the program, so we got a pretty young group,” Ridenhour said.
“Right now, I think we are starting three or four freshmen in the group. College soccer has gotten older, so there are not a lot of teams that start a lot of freshmen. We are starting more freshmen than most, so our guys are going to get up to speed pretty quick.”
The volleyball team is entering this season with big goals after coming off their extremely close game in the Big South Championship against High Point. Head Coach Heather Gearhart discussed the upcoming season and expectations.
“We have pretty big expectations and pretty big goals for ourselves. We wanna win the regular season and the conference tournament for the Big South title,” Gearhart said.
“We are in a pretty fortunate position since we have a really solid core group of returners that have a lot of experience, and even though we are pretty young in some positions, the young ones still got a lot of experience last year, so that sort of consistency is really going to help us.”
The men’s soccer team’s next game is on Sept. 5 at Queens University at 7 p.m., and the women’s team will play against Western Carolina University on Sept. 7 at 6 p.m.
The next match for men’s golf will be on Sept. 6th at UNC Greensboro, and the women’s golf team will play in the Fall Golfweek challenge on Sept. 7 at Pawley’s Island.
The volleyball team’s next two games will be on Sept. 5 against Wofford College and the University of Tennessee at 10 a.m and 7 p.m, respectively. The next match for men’s and women’s cross country will be on Sept. 12 at Pfeiffer University.
