Early thoughts, with the caveat that the men have only played exhibition games thus far (and Bobby doesn't take them as seriously as some)...
Men
- Dominated Coastal for most of the game, but lost 2-0 off of goals via a long throw and a defensive miscommunication resulting in a Coastal player splitting our CBs. Poor/unlucky finishing, and a little out of sync with the final ball.
- Nico started at RB before moving to CB later in the first half. Wake had a lot of success early on with him and Hosei overlapping (and with Holland and Jahlane overlapping on the left) before going away from it a bit.
- The freshmen looked solid on the whole in mixed minutes. Babacar Niang started in CM and looked very, very good. Roald Mitchell didn't play too much but looked solid in his minutes, with one stellar run in particular. Nico Mancilla played a stretch at LB and played pretty well in terms of defensive positioning and also bombing forward. Trace Alphin played the last 30 minutes, and while he let in the second goal he also made a great 1v1 stop on the initial shot. I'm sure I'm missing a few and I apologize to them. All told, plenty of reasons to be excited.
- Regulars from previous years that didn't play for whatever reason: Jake Swallen, Aristotle Zarris, Cristian Escribano.
- The first 20 or so minutes (prior to substitutions) was one of the best stretches I've seen from a Wake team. If that's the ceiling, then there's no reason to think we won't be contenders come tourney time once again.
Women
- Good start with unlucky finishing against UIC (whose keeper played wonderfully), and then a true demolition job against High Point: 3-0, plus two goals ruled out for offside (one seemingly incorrectly), a hit post, and a missed penalty.
- As noted above, LOTS of freshmen. We technically started 8 against HPU, with Ryanne Brown and Sofia Rossi as the only pre-COVID Deacs. (Note that Gi Demarco has not played for unspecified reasons, nor has Hulda Arnarsdottir, who is recently back in the country after opting out of the COVID season.)
- Looks like we have a fair bit of quality CM depth, which is nice. Freshmen Malaika Meena (England) and Nikayla Small (Canada) are both very talented on the ball and have already seemingly developed a strong rapport, and Sophie Faircloth (one of the stronger performers during the COVID year) has been moved from outside back to holding mid. We played some very pretty passing patterns in both games.
- The real question for any Tony da Luz team is how aggressive they are willing to play against good teams. The exhibition games against #7 Clemson and #17 South Carolina *seemingly* augur well for that, but let's call that a big TBD. (I've been fooled by strong early season starts before, let's say.) Early returns seem to indicate that he's okay pushing the outside backs pretty high up into the attack this year, which is encouraging.