Five Years Later: Looking Back at the 2015 Ivy Championship Team
11/13/2020
However it turned out, the 2015 season for the Princeton women’s soccer team promised to be a new chapter in the program’s history, and entering the season, the questions were many.
After 20 seasons under Julie Shackford, for years the program’s all-time winningest coach, how would things be different under Sean Driscoll?
Though Tyler Lussi ’17 was back to begin the second half of her Tiger career, who else would score? Lussi had 18 goals in 2014, but no other returning player had more than three that year.
Who would backstop the team? Darcy Hargadon ’15 was one of nine seniors in her class, and no keeper on the 2015 roster had started more than one game at Princeton entering the season.
The program continues to have a proud history of success, with 10 Ivy League championships and 13 trips to the NCAA tournament. And though the 2012 season saw Princeton go to West Virginia and stun the 16th-ranked Mountaineers to open that year’s NCAA tournament, the 2013 and 2014 seasons did not see the program add to those Ivy League or NCAA appearance counts.
“If I’ve learned anything in coaching, it’s that the seasons you think you’re going to be great, you tend to fall short,” Driscoll said. “And the seasons that you have less expectations, you tend to do a little bit better.”
Maybe that helped a 2015 Tiger team with so many questions. The first weekend went well, with wins over Howard and Fordham, and though three straight losses to Rutgers, Duquesne and Delaware followed, Princeton turned it around in time to build some momentum heading into the Ivy League season, with wins over Villanova, La Salle and 23rd-ranked William & Mary in the final pre-Ivy stretch.
The pre-season questions began to get answers. Who would score? Lots of players, with nine different Tigers getting goals over those first eight games. Lussi was up to six goals, and freshman Mimi Asom began to show her promise right away, scoring four times.
“I had heard about Mimi and then had the chance to see her play during the summer after learning she was going to be an incoming first-year player,” Driscoll said. “I got to see her ability on the field and the idea of her and Tyler teaming up as well as the rest of the talent on the team, I thought that we would be a good team, but it was unfair for me to forecast anything because I didn’t really know all that much about the league.”
Between the posts, Hannah Winner ’17 emerged as the starter, and eight games into his tenure, Driscoll stood at 5-3 already with a win over a top-25 opponent to his team’s credit.
Although Princeton had earned at-large bids to the NCAA tournament in prior years, Ivy League play goes a long way to determining a season’s success. An NCAA bid, however it is earned, is fantastic, but to do so with an Ivy title is even better.
That pre-Ivy momentum continued, and what was a three-game winning streak grew week after week, reaching 11 by the time Princeton beat Cornell in the penultimate Ivy game of the year to clinch the outright title. The last time Princeton had won that many games in a row? 2012, the last time before 2015 that the Tigers had won the Ivy title and made the NCAA tournament.
The 11th win in that 2012 streak was the West Virginia game, and although a scoreless tie at Penn stopped the winning streak, Princeton’s NCAA bid and Ivy title were secured, and all that remained was the destination and the journey when it came to the postseason.
A day after the Penn tie, Princeton learned its NCAA destination, and for the first time since the construction of Roberts Stadium was completed in 2008, that destination would be home. It would be the first time since 2004 that the NCAA women’s soccer tournament came to Princeton, when the program’s run to the NCAA semifinals began with four straight games at Lourie-Love Field, the same ground that transformed into Roberts just three years later.
“I remember when the draw came out, I was like, oh my gosh, of all teams BC - one that I knew so well from living in the northeast – I got nervous because they were an ACC team, but more excited than anything else, and our team was beyond excited to play in the game,” Driscoll said.
Coming to Roberts was a Boston College team that had closed its season with a tie at Florida State, the same Florida State program that won the NCAA title the year before and would make it back to the NCAA finals just a few weeks later.
Like Princeton, the Eagles had two main strikers in McKenzie Meehan and Hayley Dowd. The pair combined for 29 goals and 63 points on the season, right around Lussi’s and Asom’s combined 27 goals and 63 points.
The first NCAA women’s tournament game at Roberts Stadium generated some buzz around campus, as it turned out.
“I remember vividly, the first thing I walked on the field with the B.C. coaches and they were just blown away by the environment, by the quality of the field that late in the season, by the way it felt, the vibe there, just in terms of the way the stadium was set up, and then of course as the game got closer to starting, the place started to fill up pretty quickly,” Driscoll said. “I remember very well in the first half, behind their goalkeeper was our football team, and as we all know, any of the times the football team is present, it’s a very loud and rambunctious and excitable group, and so they alone helped set the tone with their enthusiasm, their excitement. I don’t remember seeing many free seats.”
Asom and Lussi came up big for Princeton in the NCAA opener, with Asom staking Princeton a 2-0 lead with 23rd-minute and 35th-minute goals, and Lussi reclaiming a two-goal lead for Princeton with a goal less than four minutes before halftime and just more than five minutes after Meehan got the Eagles on the board.
“It was just an incredible, incredible experience, and then to have the result that we did, I remember very clearly being up 3-1 at the half and thinking to myself, we’ve got a really good shot here, just because of how well we were playing,” Driscoll said. “It was really a matchup of Tyler and Mimi against their two strikers who were two of the leading strikers in the ACC at the time in scoring.”
Lussi pushed the lead to 4-1 with a goal less than five minutes after halftime, and Princeton kept Boston College off the board for better than 50 minutes until an Eagles goal with 62 seconds to play.
Most of the team hadn’t played in the NCAA tournament before. None had played an NCAA tournament game at home before. It was a ‘first’ the 2015 Tigers wouldn’t forget.
“To see us thrive in that environment, I’m comfortable to say that I bet any player you ask who played during that game and in subsequent years would say that was probably the best experience of their career,” Driscoll said. “In fact, I think I remember Jesse McDonough saying the same thing, how much she remembered that game and what it meant to her.”
Princeton got the chance to advance, and though the Tigers’ second-round opponent would be a California team, whether it’d be Cal State Fullerton or an 11th-ranked USC team that would go on to win the NCAA title in 2016 wasn’t clear until penalty kicks decided that first-round matchup. Following a 3-3 tie, USC ended up advancing in PKs, 4-3, drawing Princeton in a game to be played at the University of Virginia.
It wasn’t Princeton’s day. USC scored in the 12th minute, in the 23rd minute, and in the 44th minute in a 3-0 Trojans win.
“I think for me, that was a real big eye-opener,” Driscoll said. “I think we as a staff worried a lot about the abilities of USC and their quality all over the field and probably gave ourselves a little less credit than we probably could have in terms of how we could have played. We actually adjusted our formation a little bit, and although we hit the crossbar first in that game and had the first real chance to score, we came a little bit unraveled toward the end of the first half, and they scored that late goal to just really make it difficult for us.”
It didn’t result in a win that day, but over the course of the season, the questions that came up before the 2015 season began to get answers.
Lussi won her second Ivy League Offensive Player of the Year award, becoming the second Tiger women’s soccer player to win two Ivy Player of the Year honors alongside Esmeralda Negron ’05. She was an All-America honoree for the first time. Asom was the Ivy’s Rookie of the Year. Driscoll was the Ivy Coach of the Year. Six Tigers earned All-Ivy honors, and for three of those Tigers, it was their first such honor.
Tiger fans, of course, know how things continued from there. Tyler Lussi graduated as Princeton’s all-time leading goal scorer and point scorer, breaking Negron’s 12-year-old records. Two years later, Asom finished as Princeton’s third-leading goal scorer and point scorer, right behind Negron in both categories.
Those who were freshmen on the 2015 team – including Asom – would win three Ivy titles and make three NCAA tournament appearances during their career, including the 2017 run that saw Princeton stun North Carolina and make the NCAA quarterfinals.
“I do think that (USC) game and that experience and that moment carried us forward into what became an unbelievable 2017 season a year removed,” Driscoll said. “In 2016, we started off really well and had a great out-of-conference record and then we stumbled during the league, but I think the two years of that experience in 2015 of really getting that awesome experience of winning a game and then going down to UVA and playing against USC, a top-15 opponent at the time, and seeing that we could play with them, although we didn’t have our best day that day, and then taking that into 2016 and falling a little bit short, I think those two seasons put together a real desire for the team to be even that much better, and an awareness and an understanding that they could compete with some of the best teams in the country. I don’t think that it’s a mistake that in 2017, they had a run when you look back at those two years and what they learned from those experiences.”
Five years later, that first-year coach has three Ivy League Coach of the Year honors to his credit, and Driscoll’s 59 wins stand second in program history only to his predecessor Shackford’s 203. The program’s eighth Ivy League title has become 10, what was a streak of four winning seasons at that time has become eight, and what was already a large family of Princeton women’s soccer alumnae who have experienced and added to that history has only grown.
