Highlands finally adds women’s soccer field
The Cowgirls finally have a home field, one that’s the right size and not a danger to the people playing on it. After sending its women’s soccer team on the road to play “home” matches in Taos and Santa Fe the last few years, New Mexico Highlands University is putting the finishing touches on a refurbished field at Memorial Middle School in Las Vegas, N.M.
It literally gives the Cowgirls home field advantage – assuming there is a 2020 season with the coronavirus pandemic threatening the immediate future of college sports.
“Needless to say, our studentathletes are pretty jacked they can get out there,” NMHU athletic director Andrew Ehling said.
With the university closed, Ehling made the women’s soccer facility one of his priorities. The Cowgirls are coming off an 0-15 season in which they scored just eight goals.
What’s worse, all but one of their matches was at the Municipal Recreation Complex in Santa Fe. Their only true home game was the season finale, a 4-0 loss to Fort Lewis at Sanchez Family Stadium.
From the cheap seats at Sanchez Family Stadium, the new turf field that was installed three years ago looks like the perfect field for soccer. The new field is fast, absorbent and state of the art. It’s also not quite big enough to host college soccer.
The field dimensions carry soccer’s sidelines dangerously close to the edge of the warped and faded track that surrounds the field, and the track is a safety concern.
The turf is bordered by a series of concrete drains that fill the space between the outer edge of the soccer field and the track.
Those drains are covered with a grate that poses a number of risks such as catching a cleat and causing injury or not providing traction for a player trying to stop.
Delays in the turf’s installation in 2017 forced the team to play all but one of its home matches in Taos and one in Bernalillo. The 2018 season was played in the stadium – much to the chagrin of opposing players and coaches who insisted it was a safety issue.
NMHU and the Rocky Mountain
Athletic Conference agreed, forcing the Cowgirls to make the 84-mile drive to Santa Fe seven times.
“Whenever you have studentathletes that can’t play at home, that’s tough,” Ehling said. “I’m all about the student-athlete experience, and that’s maybe one of the worst things you can do for them, telling them they can’t play at home.”
NMHU has gone 8-51-5 the last four seasons, dating to the team’s final year on the old turf field at Sanchez Family Stadium and the nomadic years that followed.
The field at Memorial Middle School will be shared with the soccer teams from Robertson High School.
The natural grass playing surface will measure 130 yards in length and 70 yards wide – with no tripping hazards lining the borders. Ehling said securing the field for the Cowgirls was one of his first goals after taking over NMHU’s struggling athletics program in January.
Hired in December, he wasn’t supposed to take the reigns until March. He got the early start after tying up loose ends at his previous stop as athletic director at McPherson College in Kansas. At Highlands, Ehling inherited an athletic department that has consistently battled budget woes and on-field losses.
The program has finished at or near the bottom in the annual RMAC rankings for the last 20 years.
The football team has been an RMAC punching bag for years, and other sports – the exceptions being men’s basketball, women’s track and women’s cross-country – have struggled badly to remain competitive.
Ehling said it’s little things like getting the women’s soccer team a permanent home that start to turn the tide. He’d also like to do something about that track inside Sanchez Family Stadium. Initially a deep shade of purple when it was installed more than a decade ago, it has since faded into lavender and developed cracks and bulges that make it unusable.
Ehling said the women’s team is able to use one of the straightaways for practice, but the rest of the surface is too dangerous to use. His too-big-to-be-true wish list is to find the money and space to build a separate facility for the track program, but Ehling is more realistic when he said the shortterm solution might be putting a cost-effective surface in its place.
“It would be a great to host our own meet one day,” he said. “Maybe even the RMAC meet, but we’re a couple years away from doing that.”