Alex Bono will be looking attentively at his phone Tuesday afternoon. Jordan Murrell said he’ll be ready too, even though he doesn’t have a phone and his laptop is broken.

Because on Tuesday, the National Soccer Coaches Association of America poll, the official rankings used in college soccer, will be revealed.

“We all look at them,” Bono said of the rankings, “but we try not to read into them as much because they don’t really mean anything in the end. But I’ll definitely tune in.”

After Saturday’s upset of No. 2 Virginia, SU will need to jump eight spots to be a Top-10 team when it takes the field Tuesday at 7 p.m. against Colgate (4-3-1, 1-0 Patriot League) at SU Soccer Stadium.

In the last 13 years, Syracuse has never held a regular season ranking higher than its current mark of No. 18. But with a 1-0 victory over the Cavaliers, SU will likely earn its highest in-season ranking since October 2001, when the new NSCAA poll is announced Tuesday at noon.

TopDrawerSoccer.com’s poll, an unofficial ranking, placed the Orange at No. 5 on Monday.

“We can say that we ignore it, but we’d be lying. We obviously care about the rankings,” Syracuse midfielder Oyvind Alseth said. “No. 5 is big for the players and the program.”

The highest ranking in program history, according to SU Athletics, was in 1984 when the Orange was No. 6 in the nation. The weekly NSCAA rankings have only been available since 1996, though, and the Orange hasn’t ranked higher than its current position. The team also hasn’t been a consistent Top-25 team since the early 2000s.

With a 7-4-1 record and a No. 18 ranking in late October 2001, Syracuse lost 4-0 to No. 5 St. John’s before losing three straight matches to end the season.

“We had an incredibly talented group of guys, but for whatever reason we never put together that magical season,” said Ryan Hickey, who played for the Orange in 2000, from 2002-04 and was a graduate assistant for two years. “What they’re doing right now takes a special group of guys to achieve.

“This is probably the most relevant we’ve been on the national stage.”

Hickey said his team’s success stemmed from its defense and goalkeeping, much like the current SU squad. But offensively, the team would “have rhythm some games and be all over the place the next.”

“We never had the consistency to stay in the national rankings,” Hickey said. “… We were always fighting to get into that upper tier.”

But after 2002, Syracuse didn’t receive any Top-25 votes until 2007, three years before current SU head coach Ian McIntyre took over. While the Orange received votes in seven weekly polls in 2007 and 2008, the Orange never cracked the Top 25.

After winning just five games through McIntyre’s first two seasons, the 2012 team jumped into the national spotlight. That season, SU finished 17th in the NSCAA rankings after an improbable run to the sweet 16.

“The guys know that after a while it gets old to be nearly,” McIntyre said. “You don’t get any points for coming in second.”

When Hickey graduated from Syracuse in 2004, the team wasn’t prominent on the national scene and he only followed his alma mater loosely.

But now, he has every game marked on his calendar and watches the Orange on ESPN3 whenever he can. When Hickey plays soccer in the Atlanta District Amateur Soccer League, he said he’s proud to say he played for SU.

“I feel like the last couple of seasons they’ve been building towards this moment,” Hickey said. “It sounds like they have the coaching in place and that magical group of players to put together that special season.”

Published on September 30, 2014 at 12:11 am

Contact Josh: jmhyber@syr.edu