BATON ROUGE – LSU head coach Brian Lee and seniors Carlie Banks, Natalie Ieyoub and Reyna Lubin met with members of the media Monday afternoon to preview the 2012 season as part of the annual LSU Soccer & Volleyball Media Day held in the media room at the LSU Basketball Practice Facility.
The reigning SEC Western Division champions are just one week from the start of the 2012 season with a trip to Norman, Okla., to face the Oklahoma Sooners on Aug. 20 at 7 p.m. CT.
Comments from head coach Brian Lee at LSU Soccer Media Day
Opening Statement …
“We are excited to be here this fall. You go through the summer at LSU and it is so hot, but once you start to see the students starting to come back into town and football media starts ramping up the coverage, we start to get excited. We get our chance to get on the field. With NCAA restrictions, we don’t really practice that much over the course of the year. We spend a lot of time with strength and conditioning. It’s a great time for the coaches and the players to get back together, start to get to know each other and train. It’s something that we really enjoy.”
On the goals of this generation of LSU Soccer …
“This year’s team is a bit a of a transition era for us. We’ve been through our initial recruiting class era, which was the Class of 2009 that played really attractive, pass and move, and up and down soccer. Then it was replaced by last year’s second era, as I would define it, with the Canadian trio, Kellie Murphy and Mo Isom. They became a defensive and gritty team. Now I think we are going to era that I feel is going to be a combination of the two. It is a new generation of players whose goal is no longer, ‘hey can we establish LSU Soccer on the national scene? Can we win the SEC West and can we compete to win the SEC?’ Now it is a new generation of kids who have different goals in mind when they get here. The accomplishments of the first two generations have allowed us to get these kids here. Now in this new generation the idea is can we win the SEC? Can we really be a final four contender this year? This year’s team will start to kick that off. Hopefully we are a combination of that gritty toughness and experience that we saw the past couple of years, but back to that attractive pass and move, wing-oriented soccer that we all love to play and the fans love to watch as well.”
On the makeup of this year’s team …
“Toward that at end, we have a freshman class that is very athletic. Three or four will have a great opportunity to play right away, but they are freshman, so we will see what happens when the game starts. Certainly, they are going to have their good times and the bad. We have a sophomore class that has three probable starters right up the spine of our team in Jodi Calloway, Kaley Blades and Alex Arlitt. Our junior class is our most experienced group. It is a big year for them as a whole to really take over the team and imprint their style of play and their goals on the team. They are led by our goalkeeper Megan Kinneman, who has split time with Mo Isom over the past couple of years, but the job is hers now. We really think she can be one of the best goalkeepers not just in the SEC, but also in the country. She is joined by Alex Ramsey, who has played at the back for us for the last two years. She has been a steady performer but she has more in her. She is excited about taking on an expanded role. Addie Eggleston is one of our attacking players. Anyone who has been out to the complex and seen her knows that she is fast, exciting and can do some tricky stuff. She is a tremendous athlete who is apt to doing almost anything on the field kind of in the Alex Morgan role if you watched any of the Olympics over the past couple of weeks. Then we have the senior class that is with us today. I really judge our kids on two things. What has the team accomplished with us and do they maximize their potential as student-athletes during the four years while they are with us? Did they get better every year? Natalie Ieyoub, Carlie Banks and Reyna Lubin epitomize that to the max. Their role within the team for each of them has increased year to year. They have become better players. They’ve come into the season as great team leaders first and foremost by example. We are excited what imprint that they leave come the end of the fall.”
On playing at the LSU Soccer Stadium …
“We’ve put together a schedule that for the first time in five to six years is really home centric. We have 13 home games and seven away. We win at about a 92 percent clip at home, and we are about a .500 team on the road. That goes for all of the top-50 teams in the country. They win at about that rate. With the new stadium, we feel that we have a fantastic home field advantage. Our fans are right on top of the field. They make a legitimate difference in the score line. They are not there just cheering us. We really feel like our fans give us a goal lead every time we step out on to the field at home. In terms of fan comfort, the new stadium is unbelievably nice. As we speak, a new front entry is being put in that will match the brick and iron style of the main concourse. When you put it all together, we have one of the nicest places for a student-athlete to come play and experience an awesome home environment led by our fans week to week. I encourage anyone who has not been out to a game yet to come out on a Friday night.
On the non-conference schedule …
“We have a bunch of them this fall. It starts Aug. 24 against Rice at home. That non-conference schedule we put together really has two purposes. The first is to give us a chance to build an NCAA Tournament resume. The RPI is an extremely important element to what we do, and certainly that schedule has no soft teams. There is no one who is going to be 300 in the RPI and drag our RPI down. It is seven teams that are all in the Top 100 in the RPI year to year, and plenty of them are in the Top 50. If we win those games, come tournament selection time when they determine who are the seeds, there will be value.
On competing in the expanded SEC for the first time in 2012 …
“It also prepares us for SEC play. We are big believers that you need to see good teams before you go play Texas A&M, Florida and Auburn, who are other teams with the same aspirations that we have. Then we get to SEC schedule and it will be a grind. When we added Texas A&M and Missouri into the league it made nine teams that were in the NCAA Tournament last year. There are 10 to 12 with legitimate hopes and aspirations for that to happen this year. There are no breaks. It will be a 13 game grind for us, but we can’t wait. We have a great group of kids, and hopefully people will take the chance to get to know this team. We want the fans to come out, join us and enjoy another fun-filled fall of LSU athletics.”