Soccer: Too much of good thing?

Steve Nugent has an interesting take on high school and club soccer.

He’d like to see less of it.

The first-year Washington State women’s soccer coach has a vested interest in finding the best girl soccer players and convincing them to take their game to Pullman as a member of his program.

Nugent, who was the head coach at North Carolina-Greensboro when the Cougars came calling, took over a program that had gone through three head coaches in four years as well as a reputation for reaching the NCAA tournament.

The Cougars reached the first round of the tournament again this year, and for the third straight year lost their first-round game, this time a heartbreaking 2-1 loss to Seattle in Pullman on Nov. 14.

Nugent, the guest at Monday’s Spokane Cougar Club luncheon, said he was tremendously proud of how his team performed this year and by the leadership his senior class demonstrated.

And he was frank in discussing the kind of player he wanted to recruit and where he was going to recruit them.

“Players make players better,” he said. “Right now, recruiting in Eastern Washington is a numbers game. I’m not sure they play enough against the best competition day in and day out.

“Speaking as the state of Washington as a whole, there’s a great premier league that produces some great young players.”

But that might just be a problem and not a plus, he said.

“If anything I’d like to see kids play less soccer than we have them playing these days,” he said. “I think we have them play too much and I think they lose their sense of urgency. They lose that sense that there is no tomorrow when they play an important game.

“When we played Seattle (in the NCAA tournament), there was no tomorrow. If we lost that game, it would be nine months – NINE MONTHS – before we would be back together playing soccer. That’s an important sense to have.”

Nugent said he relies on known commodities when it comes to where he recruits. He prefers coaches with a track record for teaching young players the right way to play the game.

That’s nothing new. That’s why there’s so much clamor to get into the programs: They’re a gateway to getting recruited by college programs – especially programs in the Pac-12 Conference, which Nugent calls the best in the nation.

“We went into our Apple Cup game with Washington ranked No. 3 in the Pac-12,” Nugent said. “We were disappointed that we ended up with a tie and not a win against Washington. We dropped from No. 3 to No. 6 because of the tie. That tells you how tough our conference is.

“The Pac-12 is without a doubt the best conference in college women’s soccer. The Pac-12 finished the season with the most teams in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament, we had the highest winning percentage of any conference, we had the most teams ranked in the Top 20 and the most teams ranked in the Top 20 RPI at the end of the season.”

Nugent said he was advised by one of his predecessors in Pullman that he should just forget about recruiting players from Southern California. Players from that part of the country just don’t want to come play soccer in Pullman.

“When we announce our recruiting class, there will be six players on that list from Southern California,” Nugent said, breaking into a wide grin. “To play Pac-12 soccer you need two things: you need goal scorers and you need goalkeepers. You fill in between them with soccer players.

“Our biggest challenge this past season was that we had beautiful plays right up to where we were 15 to 18 yards out. We just didn’t have someone with that killer instinct. We will have that next year. I’m very proud of the recruiting classes we have for both 2015 and 2016.”