FAYETTEVILLE — Arkansas’ soccer team was picked to finish 12th out of 14 teams in the SEC this year.
On Sunday, the Razorbacks will travel to South Carolina for a game that may determine the SEC's regular season champion. Both teams are 6-0 in conference play.
Arkansas (13-1) has won eight straight games and knocked off a pair of soccer blue bloods - Duke and Florida - to get to this point. The Razorbacks are No. 11 nationally and may all-but lock up a home regional for the NCAA Tournament with a win over the No. 4 Gamecocks.
“This is the best group I’ve coached in 20 years in terms of their cohesion and their ability to deal with stuff,” Arkansas coach Colby Hale said. “We haven’t had a bad training session yet. We’ve had a bad half, had a bad start — moments that weren’t great, but we have seven seniors and they have been phenomenal.
"These seniors committed when Arkansas was not good at soccer. They hadn’t been to the SEC Tournament in 14 years when I got here (in 2012). They have a little bit of a chip on their shoulder and I think sometimes that carries us.”
Arkansas was buoyed during the offseason with a recruiting class that was ranked the 21st best nationally and included four players from the Dallas Sting club team. One of those players was Stefani Doyle, who scored four goals in her first three games.
Doyle, who earned SEC weekly awards in each of her first two weeks, is one of six players on Arkansas’ roster from the same club team, which was ranked No. 2 in the country at one point last year.
“I love having them here,” Doyle said of her former club teammates. “We all connect well.”
Having so many club connections helped the team gel quickly and Arkansas won its first five games. Having better health has helped, too. The Razorbacks had 14 players miss at least one game last season with an injury.
Those misfortunes - and that preseason ranking - serve as motivation this year. After winning two NCAA Tournament games in 2013 and another in 2014, Arkansas took a step back last season and finished with a 6-11-1 overall record, and 2-8-1 record in SEC games.
The Razorbacks beat Alabama in the season finale in a matchup that determined which team would finish last in the conference standings.
“It affected us big time,” said senior goal keeper Cameron Carter. “That’s something I don’t want to go through again.
“We’ve always been a team they bash and talk bad about, but they never see how hard we work and how we train for a game.”
A pivotal moment in Arkansas’ rebound came during the spring when Hale got frustrated, kicked the players out of practice and told them to go home.
In the locker room, one player said, “I don’t know why he’s upset. It wasn’t that bad.”
Hale had a meeting later with the seniors and told them to not let the team settle for mediocrity. "Not that bad" wasn’t good enough.
“We challenged the seniors that we’re going to rise to our own level of expectations,” said Hale, who set the school record for career wins earlier this year. “If we’re the type of team that says, ‘We won, but we can do better,’ we’re going to win a lot of games.
“They have led that charge every step of the way. When we have a problem arise, the seniors step up. They’ll say, ‘Colby we need a second,’ and solve it themselves. No one was willing to say the difficult thing last season.”
Arkansas has proved itself time and again this season. The Razorbacks' win over then-No. 2 Duke in August was the program's first over a top 5 team. Arkansas followed that up with a win over then-No. 4 Florida the following month.
The Razorbacks hope to add another top 5 win this weekend on the road, which would be another program first.
Hale has warned his team about resting on their accomplishments. He used a Halloween analogy: Collect the candy first, then eat it when you're finished.
“We don’t want to just be a sport here that just takes up space," Hale said. "We want to be a contributing member to this athletics department and I think these young ladies are doing an awesome job of that.”
An earlier version of this story appeared in Hawgs Illustrated magazine