Cardinal ready to begin run at title
Since Virginia won four straight NCAA men’s soccer titles in the early 1990s, no school had won three in a row until Stanford did it the past three seasons. A fourth could be difficult. The Cardinal have lost seven starters from last year’s team, including Pac-12 Player of the Year Foster Langsdorf, Top Drawer Soccer’s Division I Player of the Year Tomas Hilliard-Arce and fellow All-Pac-12 first-team selections Corey Baird and Drew Skundrich.
On top of those departures, Stanford will have a target on its back. Every opponent will want a shot at taking down the king.
“It puts pressure on you, but that’s how great teams are made — when you can perform under pressure,” sophomore midfielder Logan Panchot said. “I think we’re going to get every team’s best game. But we enjoy that. We come out every game ready to fight back.”
Ranked No. 1 in the coaches’ preseason poll, the Cardinal open the season against San Jose State on Friday at Cagan Stadium, where last year they went 10-1-2. Then they go on a trip to play Maryland and No. 13 Georgetown.
Indiana, which Stanford beat in December’s College Cup final, is ranked No. 2. All this must be fine for the Panchot family of St. Louis. Logan’s brother Austin is a senior midfielder/forward for the Hoosiers.
Logan said they haven’t talked about a possible rematch of the 2017 title game. “We talk every day, but we don’t look that far ahead,” he said.
Good thing, because Stanford head coach Jeremy Gunn prefers to stick to the here and now. His past three teams have gone 52-7-10 and last season, the Cardinal didn’t allow a goal in the NCAA Tournament for the second straight year. But that’s in the past.
“We’re only returning four starting players, so we’ve got lots of pieces to put together,” Gunn said. “It’s most definitely a work in progress.”
As for the target on his team’s back, he called it “a massive disadvantage. Every team is going to bring its highest energy of the season to play against us. We’ll happily take that challenge on. You’d much rather have a huge target on your back for positive reasons than have everybody excited to play you because you’re a rollover.”
He also sees a significant benefit.
“What it means for us is that every game is going to be so tough that at the end of the season, we’ll be battle-hardened,” Gunn said.
All-Pac-12 defender Tanner Beason, who provided the winning goals on penalties in exhibitions against St. Mary’s and Cal State Northridge, is conscious of the fact Stanford lost its top four scorers from last year.
“We have to find confidence and build (on-field) relationships,” he said, “but we have enough threats to score plenty of goals.”
One of those threats is senior Amir Bashti, a Cupertino native who scored six goals last year. Along with defender Adam Mosharrafa, Bashti would love to join ex-Virginia players A.J. Wood and Clint Peay as the only four-time national champions in men’s college soccer history.
“Since I got here at Stanford, I feel like the team culture at Stanford breeds a desire to win and compete and do all the fundamentals to the best of our ability,” Bashti said. “Every year we had special players that could make a difference in those matches. Most importantly, we had that team unity and the desire to work and fight for each other.”
Tom FitzGerald is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tfitzgerald@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @tomg fitzgerald