MORGANTOWN — The afternoon had started as a wonderful one for West Virginia’s women’s soccer coach Nikki Izzo-Brown, who had gathered with her team and school administrators inside the Coliseum for the NCAA selection show.
That she and her Mountaineers would be selected was not in question. They were the Big 12 regular season and tournament champions, currently engrossed in an 18-match unbeaten streak and the last time they had looked, which was a day earlier, they held the No. 6 RPI ranking, which would normally leave them with a No. 2 seed.
Nothing could bother her, not even wiping ketchup out of her youngest daughter’s hair as they enjoyed a buffet and awaited the selection show to begin.
Then came the draw and Nikki Izzo-Brown’s 1,000-watt smile turned into a scowl, for WVU did not land the No. 2 seed they coveted, but instead wound up with a No. 3 seed.
That was when she turned to E. Gordon Gee, the school president, who must have heard there would be cameras present, and jokingly asked if he knew of a good lawyer because she was thinking of suing the NCAA.
While that does seem to be in vogue these days, it certainly wasn’t called for even though WVU has as strong a case to be ranked as 2-seed as Florida, Penn State, North Carolina and Virginia, although her team did open the season with a 3-1 defeat at Penn State.
Seeded as they are, the Mountaineers will play Georgetown in the first round of the tournament at Dick Dlesk Stadium here at 4 p.m. Saturday. If they win, they will play the winner of the Dayton-Virginia Tech game and if they can advance past that they face Penn State, the No. 2 seed.
“My reaction was a bit of frustration because my job as coach is to fix things. I tell the girls all year we have to fix what’s wrong. We have to fix the losses. I just don’t understand what we’re doing wrong and I don’t know how to fix it anymore,” Izzo-Brown would say later, following the entire draw.
“It’s a frustrating thing at my end when I’m supposed to guide a group of great young women. That was swirling in my head … what else do I have to do. I guess it was a bit of frustration. We had the second best conference RPI and you go through it unbeaten.
“As a coach you can never really control anything,” Izzo-Brown continued. “I’m with this team day in and day out, watch them on game day, I know they are going to come through and work hard for the Mountaineers. This committee I never know what they are going to do and I know they are not representing us or working with us every day to understand what we’re really all about.”
But …
“As excited as we were and as much as we respect winning the Big 12, this team’s response was now it’s on to the NCAA Tournament to make a run. We’re putting the Big 12 Tournament on the shelf and putting all our energy into this game,” the coach said.
Like what else is there to say about it without sounding like you are whining?
So Izzo-Brown moved on.
And that means get ready for Georgetown, a team they tied early in the year, 1-1, in Washington, D.C., even though they held the Hoyas to just three shots in the game.
“I have a ton of respect for Georgetown. We played them earlier this year and they tied us,” she said. “We understand what’s at stake. It’s not an easy first-round game for sure.”
As good as WVU has been under Izzo-Brown, the program’s only coach, it hasn’t lived up to expectations in the NCAA Tournament.
The Mountaineers have been there 15 times and own a 12-14-1 record, having reached the Elite Eight once.
The team will be led into the Big 12 Tournament by seniors Kate Schwindel, the Big 12s offensive player of the year, and Kadeisha Buchanan, the defensive player of the year.
“It’s going to be huge for me and all of us,” Schwindel said. “We play for our seniors. This being my senior year, it means a lot.”
“We want to peak at the right time and we are playing our best soccer right now,” added sophomore defender Karly Black. “We know what this is about.”
Follow Bob Hertzel on Twitter @bhertzel
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