Indeed, the darkness was gathering. Yet as the Colorado women’s soccer team began warming up for the third time that evening, a voice cried out amid the circle of Buffaloes that perfectly summed up the state of affairs.
“Get off the bus!”
That, of course, was a plea directed toward the Colorado State Rams, who turned a routine, season-opening rivalry matchup on Thursday into a fiasco that, for at least the near future, is likely to alter the relations between the women’s soccer programs at the state’s two biggest universities.
To recap, the Buffs had jumped to a 3-0 lead in the first half at Prentup Field, but five minutes into the second half lighting forced a delay. After about one hour the teams were back on the field, warmed up, at their positions, and ready to renew the action. If there was a cartoon version of this story, we’d see the referee inhaling, his lips poised over the whistle that would signal the restart of play, when another lightning strike within the prescribed 10-mile radius forced a continuation of the pause.
That’s how close the teams were to resuming play. Instead the teams again retreated from the field, the Buffs to their locker room, the Rams to their bus at the back of the Prentup parking lot. And that’s when things got weird.
Once the all-clear was issued once again, the Buffs and the refs were ready to resume play and at least log the 20 additional minutes required to make the match official (similar to the five-inning rule in baseball). The Rams, however, declined to return to the field.
Multiple sources that witnessed the exchange between CU officials and CSU coach Keeley Hagen said the Rams’ leader, after citing hurdles that also applied to the Buffs like having not eaten, simply declared, “We don’t want to play because we’re losing.”
“They said, ‘You’d do the same thing,’” Sanchez said. “I said, ‘No we wouldn’t. We’d play the game.’ By the time this conversation was going on, I said we could’ve been playing soccer right now. She just said, ‘We’re not going to play.’”
The obscure rule the Rams cited states that any game delayed due to weather must be restarted within three hours of the original kickoff, unless an extension is agreed upon by both coaches. By the letter of the law, events had spun past that deadline. But Sanchez said he believes the spirit of that rule was intended for visiting teams who have flights to catch, not one a couple hours up the road. He also said in 27 years of collegiate coaching, he has never witnessed that rule being discussed, let alone invoked.
The lack of lights at Prentup is an embarrassment at this point for CU, but ultimately that was a non-factor in how events played out. There was ample daylight to log the 20 minutes required to make it an official match, and the darkness is a call to be made by the officials, not either coach. Furthermore, the lack of lights had zero impact in regard to the mandate CSU dug out of the rule book.
At first, Sanchez and CU officials believed an agreement was in place to start the match all over again on Friday. After consulting the referees — the only ones that might be available on such short notice — it turned out a 10 a.m. kickoff was going to be required, as the ref crew already had an assignment in Wyoming later Friday afternoon. When this information was relayed to Hagen, Sanchez said the response was: “Well, we just don’t want to play because it’s not in (our) best interest. At that point, that was it.”
Hagen declined an interview request from BuffZone, but on Friday she offered this statement through the CSU media relations office:
“First and foremost, our number one priority is the health and safety of our student-athletes. There are rules in place to protect student-athletes for the exact situation that unfolded yesterday. The two-plus hour weather delay and a lack of available lighting at the field fell into that rule’s perimeters. It is unfortunate that we were unable to finish the match. We’ve turned our attention to competing against Denver on Sunday.”
Sanchez said there will be an attempt to add a match to the CU schedule, but at this juncture finding a reasonable foe that has an identical open window on the 2021 ledger will be almost impossible. It remains to be seen how the lack of a certain win against the Rams will affect the RPI of a Buffs team seeking its third consecutive NCAA Tournament berth — in the program’s previous eight years of existence, the Rams have recorded just one winning season — but any win counts more than a no contest.
For what it’s worth, the no-contest forced by CSU also scuttled the Colorado Cup, the semi-annual round-robin competition between the state’s Division I programs that culminates in a doubleheader at the University of Denver on Sunday (CU faces Colorado College in what now is the season opener at noon, followed by the Rams and Pioneers). It is a competition certainly secondary to every team’s conference slate, but it was the brainchild of the predecessor of both Sanchez and Hagen, former CU and CSU coach Bill Hempen, that ties those Division I programs together in a state rich with women’s soccer talent.
About that talent. Thursday marked the first (non)game for Hagen in a job she was just hired for less than three months ago following 10 years as an assistant at Texas. No doubt there is plenty of time to make an impression at the new job, particularly if she turns around a program unaccustomed to winning. But the Rams already are at least third in the pecking order for Colorado talent behind the Buffs and DU. And it’s difficult to picture the next wave of the state’s top soccer recruits watching Thursday’s events unfold believing there’s interesting things going on with the new regime in Fort Collins. Don’t expect CU to schedule the Rams again in the near future.
As for the Buffs, while Sanchez expressed frustration at Thursday’s turn of events, by Friday he vowed his program had turned the page for what remains a 2021 season full of high expectations.
“We’re putting a positive spin on it, and we’re putting the spin on it that we did play well,” Sanchez said. “We scored good goals. We got a lot of players good playing time in that 50 minutes that we played. And then we moved on to Colorado College. It is what it is. There’s bigger deals in the world. We got to play most of the match and it’s not going to be something that we dwell on.”
"between" - Google News
August 22, 2021 at 02:29AM
https://ift.tt/3z7RUKZ
Rooney: Sorting through soccer fiasco between CU Buffs, CSU Rams - buffzone.com
"between" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2WkNqP8
https://ift.tt/2WkjZfX
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Rooney: Sorting through soccer fiasco between CU Buffs, CSU Rams - buffzone.com"
Post a Comment