Even though the Syracuse men’s soccer team’s 4-2 loss Sunday to Connecticut marked the season’s end, coach Dean Foti swore he saw a different team from earlier this fall.

Despite missing the Big East tournament for the second straight year and once again faltering down the stretch, Foti made it clear the Orangemen ended the season far better than they began it.

SU saw its season begin miserably, losing both its No. 23 preseason ranking and games to Virginia Commonwealth and Coastal Carolina before September’s second week.

‘There are guys who we expected to come in and be in shape who didn’t come into the season in shape,’ junior captain Chris Aloisi said. ‘As much as they were ready to go by midseason, that first part of the season hurts us. You have to come in top shape.’

Foti said earlier this season he sat Kirk Johnson, an All-Big East forward, and Jarett Park, the 2001 National Freshman of the Year, for the first three games because they were out of shape.

When Johnson and Park returned, it seemed so did the Orangemen. Syracuse went on a four-game winning streak, beating Georgetown, Colgate, Adelphi and Loyola.

But Syracuse lost its next game to Seton Hall. That game didn’t just end a four-game winning streak — it also sidelined senior defender Eric Chapman with a concussion for the remainder of the season. Without Chapman, Syracuse lost a devastating 3-0 game to Providence on Sept. 28.

But only in a year as unpredictable as this could the turning point have come in another shocking road loss.

‘The turning point of the season was when we played Villanova,’ Foti said of a game SU lost, 3-1, to a 2-8 team. ‘We played hard the whole game. We may not have won, but I realize soccer is a game where you could dominate and lose. That happened to us there.’

SU was 5-5 after losing to Villanova but went unbeaten in its next four games.

That streak included a victory over then-No. 14 Rutgers and a 1-1 tie against then-No. 3 St. John’s, perhaps the finest Syracuse played all season. The Orangemen dominated the Red Storm, outshooting them, 15-3, after the first half, but missed on several second-half, game-winning opportunities.

‘You could look at our St. John’s game as maybe the best we played all season,’ Aloisi said. ‘That was a big eye-opener. It really showed us what we could accomplish.’

With SU’s 3-3-1 Big East record, the season appeared salvageable with four games remaining. But the Orangemen’s recent late-season struggles — they were 0-8 over the final four games of the past two seasons — once again doomed them. The Orangemen dropped a 3-1 contest to Boston College on Oct. 23 before losing, 1-0, to Virginia Tech on Oct. 27.

A meaningless non-conference game at Cornell turned into a glimpse of SU’s future as freshmen Robert Alexander and Jeff Evans each scored their first goals in a 2-1 win.

But Foti didn’t seem too surprised.

‘Our expectations were high for a lot of the freshmen,’ Foti said. ‘They still have to come in and perform and execute, but we don’t recruit players to suck. We wouldn’t be very successful if we were doing that.’

The Cornell win also capped off a 4-0-2 record in the New York State region, but knowing the team had almost no shot at making the Big East tournament overshadowed the accomplishment.

And Sunday’s loss to UConn ended Syracuse’s once-promising season at 8-8-2.

‘We played our best soccer the entire second half of the season,’ Foti said. ‘By the end of the season, our concentration level was where I felt it should be. Was it there in the beginning of the season? I don’t think it was. Had it been, we probably would still be playing right now.’

Published on November 5, 2002 at 12:00 pm