The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Bridgeport women’s soccer’s journey ends with a national title
The state police were waiting for them at the Connecticut line. The University of Bridgeport women’s soccer players, on the long bus drive back from Pittsburgh, didn’t know what was happening. How could they? After all, this was the program that went 0-15 in Magnus Nilerud’s first-year as coach in 1999.
And this was the team that went out for a twogame trip to Michigan in September. Against the advice of his wife Sharon, Nilerud took his team into Grand Valley St. and got smoked, 6-0. The shots were 28-2.
And now here they were on Sunday, 30 miles from the end of their journey.
It is one that starts with a freshman arriving at Bridgeport from Karlstad, Sweden, in 1995. A Swede coaching the men’s team heard about Nilerud, recruited him and promptly left a month before he arrived. This didn’t stop Nilerud from becoming a fouryear starter and two-time All-New England Conference selection.
Joe Barroso, now the Sacred Heart men’s coach, coached Nilerud his final two years at Bridgeport. Barroso also coached the Bridgeport women. As Nilerud graduated in marketing in 1999, Barroso accepted the Sacred Heart’s women job.
Nilerud was planning to work at a marketing firm in
New York City.
“I had grown pretty close with the AD (Joe DiPuma),” Nilerud said. “He was like, listen, I’m a Manhattan guy, I know the entry level position you’re going into and I’ve gotten a job through a friend of ours. That company is not going to go under if you don’t go there now.
“Can you just do me a solid? Get me through the season and go into Manhattan when the season’s over. I went to the guy who employed me, and he said no worries.”
Just like that, Nilerud was a college soccer coach.
“We had four kids turn up for preseason,” Nilerud said. “I basically spent the entire season walking through the dorms and dining hall, asking kids, ‘Can you jump on the bus and go to Albany to play?’
“Men’s and women’s basketball were very, very good and if women’s soccer didn’t go through with the season, in return, the basketball teams wouldn’t qualify for the NCAA Tournament.”
The Purple Knights scored five goals. All season. They conceded 163. First game they lost to St. Rose, 19-0.
“I went into my AD and said, ‘When I’m sitting in my rocking chair and my grandkids say, grandad, I heard you were a college coach, this isn’t the legacy I want to leave behind. Give me one more year.’ (DiPuma) said go for it.”
Nilerud went 7-12, then 10-8 and hasn’t had a losing season since. He never took that job in New York. The Purple Knights have become a staple in the NCAA Tournament. Nilerud has been national coach of the year.
Yet Bridgeport — let alone women’s soccer — had never won a NCAA team championship.
“I’ve always said it’s easy to go from awful to average,” Nilerud said. “We sold kids that we’re building the program around them. We turned it around pretty quickly. The challenging part was going from good to very good. You didn’t only have to change players, you had to change a mentality.”
A turning point came in 2004. Bridgeport beat Adelphi on the road. Adelphi went on to the national finals.
“Our first really big win,” Nilerud said. “The kids started to believe.”
Bridgeport would go on to to qualify for the NCAA Tournament 10 of 12 years, although 2017 had been a rebuilding year of 8-8-2.
“This year’s team is not the best players we’ve had,” Nilerud said. “Our 2009 and 2016 teams had better players by far, but the group that wins normally is the team with the best chemistry. The integrity of this locker room, these kids were so united, the stars were aligned.
“Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got some unbelievable players, but when you look on paper, UC San Diego and Grand Valley St. had better players than us. But not on the day we played them. We deserved to win.”
The Bridgeport roster includes three from Connecticut, seven from Sweden, four from U.K., three from Brazil, two from Norway and one from South Africa and Netherlands. Maegen Doyle of Harwich, England, scored a schoolrecord 28 goals. Goalkeeper Jennifer Wendelius, of Lidingo, Sweden, would be Most Outstanding Defensive Player at the Final Four. They are both Academic All-Americans.
“You have so many different cultural and regional backgrounds, it’s amazing how close they get,” Nilerud said. “But there’s a common language, and no matter if they come from Seattle or Stockholm, they’ve got the same goals in soccer and in the classroom.”
Remember the 19-0 game? The Purple Knights would beat St. Rose in the second round of the 48team NCAA Tournament. They’d beat LIU Post and host Bloomsburg St. to advance to the national semifinals for the second time in four years. They would beat UC San Diego, 2-0, on goals by Amanda Ebbesson and Doyle. Only Grand Valley St. remained.
“We take a trip every year to kind of mimic what a Final Four would look like,” Nilerud said. “This year happened to be Grand Valley. My wife said, ‘You’re absolutely off your rocker, going out there.’” Sharon was right. “We were handsomely beat,” Nilerud said. “It was 6-0. If it had been 15-0, I wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.”
But, now, it was different. Lakers coach Jeff Hosler, whose No. 1 team was 25-0-1, had the challenge of convincing his players this would not be a rout. Nilerud had a game plan. Stay organized. Stay compact. And while they were outshot, 18-5, and Grand Valley had a 11-3 advantage in corner kicks, the defense and Wendelius stood tall.
“I had told them, ‘You play Grand Valley, you’d probably lose eight or nine of 10. But today is not eight or nine,’ ” Nilerud said.
Not Saturday. Not at Highmark Stadium. With a little more than 12 minutes remaining, Elin Eklund’s shot beat Grand Valley’s Jessica Radice, but hit the crossbar. Nara DaCosta was there to head in the game’s only goal.
“You couldn’t have written a better script,” Nilerud said. “It was fantastic.”
So here was the team bus crossing into Greenwich on I-95 Sunday. Nilerud let the bus driver in on the secret, so he wouldn’t pull over in a panic. The state police began its escort.
“The kids had no clue,” Nilerud said. “We get off Exit 25 in Bridgeport, the state police are waving us on, they started to pick up on it. The kids are like why are we getting off here? The bus driver said, ‘My wife called and I’ve got to pick up milk.’ ”
They pulled into the Stop & Shop on Fairfield Avenue. There were four police cars, lights flashing, with Mayor Ganim waiting to get on the bus to say a few words.
The bus headed for campus, sirens blaring, running red lights.
“When the players stepped off the bus, they started seeing people cheering, the cheerleaders, but the lights in the gym was still turned off,” Nilerud said. “They walked into the lobby. All of a sudden the lights went on. There must have been 1,000 kids going crazy. It’s an experience they will remember the rest of the life.”
The journey Magnus Nilerud started in 1999 was complete. Bridgeport had its national champions.