Syracuse wasn’t in a good place when it walked out of Spry Stadium on Nov. 8, 2013.

There wasn’t much talking following a 4-1 loss at Wake Forest that ended the Orange’s season. Aside from a short speech by head coach Ian McIntyre congratulating his disappointed players on winning 10 games in its first year in the Atlantic Coast Conference, the plane ride back was silent.

“There’s not a lot that you as a coach say after,” McIntyre said. “I think sometimes you think that you’re going to have some big, emotional, Churchillian speech afterward. And really, you give yourself a couple of days, you take stock of what’s happened and you build for the future.”

One season after entering its final game needing a win and some help just to capture the eighth and last spot in the ACC tournament, the Orange found out on Tuesday that it finished its regular season as the nation’s top-ranked team — SU’s first time owning the top spot in program history.

No. 1 Syracuse (14-2-1, 5-2-1 ACC) has used much of the same roster to accomplish what it couldn’t last year, with 29 of its 30 goals coming from players that were on 2013 team.

It will be many of the same players that tasted that despair last year that take the SU Soccer Stadium field in the quarterfinals of ACC tournament on Sunday at 1 p.m. The tournament’s second seed, Syracuse will face either seventh-seeded Duke (8-8-1, 4-4) or 10th-seeded North Carolina State (7-6-4, 1-4-3), who face off on Wednesday in Durham, North Carolina.

“I definitely like that a lot better that we still have games to play,” junior goalkeeper Alex Bono said. “…Other teams are sitting in the library today not having practice. We’re lucky enough to be out on the grass and on the field with the team.”

Syracuse came into the season unranked and picked to finish last in the ACC Atlantic Division, and second to last out of 12 ACC teams. SU was coming off a season in which it finished 3-7-1 in the ACC. It was a team that had won only three games just three years before.

The nuance differences between last year and 2014 were hard to pinpoint for McIntyre. Aside from a new 3-5-2 formation, not much changed tactically over the nine-month offseason.

“How could I have messed up such a good team (last year)?” McIntyre jokingly asked himself.

Syracuse added a couple new pieces in left wing Liam Callahan and midfielder Julian Buescher. But a spike in quality can be attributed to experience, McIntyre said. His freshmen became sophomores, with a full year under their belts. And his juniors became seniors, who realized that there’s only one more chance to get it done.

“No one else believed in us other than ourselves,” senior defender Jordan Murrell said. “We were just motivated together and we put the work in.”

The Orange has gone from a team looking to instill fear in powerhouses to becoming one itself. In its 1-0 loss to Notre Dame on Sept. 13, McIntyre said he saw a different team on the field than the one he had become accustomed to seeing against the perennial top-ranked teams.

He said that his goal used to be just to “hang in there” against the best of the best and maybe try to catch a break to shock the college soccer world.

“We’re ultimately going to be evaluated by how we do in the ACC, against the best teams in the country,” McIntyre said after that game. “After a while, you start to believe you can win those games and we’re starting to do that now. Your expectations start going up.”

The Syracuse players all gathered in Murrell’s and Bono’s room to watch Wake Forest play Louisville on Saturday, with the Orange needing a Demon Deacon win to clinch the ACC Atlantic Division.

They bought the online stream and intently watched as Louisville dominated offensively, out-shooting WFU 19-10 before Demon Deacon midfielder Ricky Greensfelder scored in overtime to end the game.

SU garnered a division title on the same field where its season ended a year ago.

“Once the Wake Forest goal went in, we all went to Twitter and tweeted ‘Come on’ or ‘Lets go’ or something like that,” Murrell said. “It’s just happy throughout the team.

“We put in the work, we proved people wrong and we’re just still looking to prove people wrong.”

Published on November 5, 2014 at 12:25 am

Contact Sam: sblum@syr.edu | @SamBlum3