Real Salt Lake isn't the only soccer team celebrating a huge victory this week. Members of the Weber State men's soccer club are celebrating their own national championship after winning a shootout in the final game of the National Campus Championship Series National Soccer Championships last weekend in Phoenix, Ariz.
"It feels terrific," said Scott Whitesides, a junior forward on the team. "This is the goal we set out to do at the beginning of the season. This is what everyone wanted to accomplish. It's been a great feeling to achieve our goal as a team."
The WSU men qualified for the tournament by winning the Region VI Championship and were invited with 24 other teams to the national championships. During the regional championships they lost their starting goalie, Jeff Rogers, and a center midfielder, Nate Bringhurst, who both sustained season-ending injuries.
Luckily, one of the strengths of the team is its deep roster. They maintain about 40-50 guys on the roster, who compete all season long to be on the varsity team. With two weeks to go until the national tournament, they were still able to maintain a talented and full roster.
One of the guys they called up who played a key role, was Jan Robbins, a player on the 2005 state championship Ogden High School team, who had just returned from an LDS mission and hadn't played goalie seriously for about three years.
"As soon as Jeff was injured, we started running training sessions for him that were pretty demanding," said head coach Will Rader.
"I was like, 'I'm rusty, but I'd be glad to play,'" Robbins said. "I just trained really hard for the tournament."
During the tournament, and the championship game, Robbins didn't look rusty. In the elite eight against Texas A&M, and again in the championship game against the University of Florida, it came down to a shootout and Robbins was able to stop about 50 percent of all penalty kicks, Rader said.
In the championship game, after six rounds of penalty kicks, WSU was up by one, and it was Robbins' final save, behind the hard work of his teammates, that cemented the championship.
"I was just thinking, 'I am definitely ready for this to be done,'" Robbins said about waiting for that final kick. "As the kick came up, how he lined it up, I thought, 'I know they're going to the left.' Sure enough he shot that way and that was it."
"Everyone rushed to him and we knew at that point we'd won and it was a great celebration," said Whitesides, who prepped at Layton High School. Whitesides was named MVP of the tournament, scoring three goals throughout the weekend.
"Aside from having the caliber of players that we have, I felt like our heart was in it and everyone was out to support each other and we were unified as a team," Whitesides said.
Robbins was named goalkeeper of the tournament and three other Weber State players received all-tournament honors; Ben Steggel, Aaron McKinley, and Kyle Christensen.
The varsity team ended with a season record of 19-0-4. Since joining the NCCSA conference, this is WSU's second national championship. Their first championship as a NCCSA member was in 2002.
"The guys just worked hard and they never questioned anything I asked of them," Rader said. "They worked hard form start to finish and it paid off for them. They were amazing in the amount of effort they put forward."
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