Collegiate Times

Tech defender Kelsey Mitchell takes a shot against UVa on Sept. 23.

While most of Virginia Tech has focused on the football team turning its season around, the women’s soccer team has done the same thing.

After starting the Atlantic Coast Conference schedule with two losses, a 3-0 loss to Virginia and a 2-1 loss to North Carolina, the Hokies have won two conference games in a row and find themselves back in the thick of things.

After the loss to UNC, in which the Hokies saw an early 1-0 lead fall by the wayside, Tech faced a serious identity crisis. It was a team full of talent, but for some reason it wasn’t getting it done on the field.

Nonetheless, the Hokies turned things around rather quickly as victories over No. 7 Maryland and No. 4 Boston College gave the Hokies their first two big wins of the season.

The cause of this turnaround has been, as cliche as it sounds, the “complete game.”

Throughout the season, the Hokies have played great soccer for 75 to 80 minutes of game time. The problem is that a soccer game is 90 minutes long, and good teams can put you away for good in that little window of time.

Examples of this temporary drop in quality have been seen in many games this season, including James Madison and UNC. On both occasions, the Hokies gave up two goals in less than 15 minutes, changing the complexion of the game entirely.

Tech was able to overcome the 2-0 deficit against the Dukes, but the two goals against the Tar Heels proved too much to handle.

The ACC is the best conference in the country. It has five teams in the top 25 and has three others that received votes (Wake Forest, Duke and Tech).

In that kind of a conference, even a five-minute slip will lose you the game.

Against Maryland, fans saw the Hokies play great soccer for all 90 minutes. There was no drop off after halftime or a let up in attack — it was a solid performance to get the Hokies’ first conference win. The same goes for the win against Boston College.

If the Hokies want to compete for the rest of the season, they are going to need to put that kind of effort on display night in and night out.

Those two games have been momentum gainers, but the Hokies still have a lot of work to do if they want to reach their third straight NCAA tournament.

Tonight, the Hokies host Wake Forest, which is 4-1 in the conference, and will follow that up with Duke on Sunday, Oct. 17.

Those two games will be very important in shaping the season.

If they win, the Hokies’ success could propel them forward to theoretically run the table, since the only remaining ranked team on the schedule is Florida State.

That being said, every win in the ACC is hard-fought, and this is also the first time Tech won’t have an out-of-conference game to break up its ACC schedule.

However, if the Hokies are unable to take advantage of this home stand against the first non-ranked opponents they’ve faced since Sept. 17, then all of the progress made in past two weeks was irrelevant.

Tech has arguably the most talented team in the program’s history, and Kelly Cagle, head coach, has been firm in her belief she has something special with this group of players.

Yet talent doesn’t always translate into success in sports, and the Hokies have six more regular season games to put it all together before the ACC tournament.

A version of this article appeared in the Oct 14 issue of the Collegiate Times.