CCU men’s soccer team stunned in Big South quarterfinals

The final stretch of the regular season brought mounting frustration for the Coastal Carolina men’s soccer team as a rash of injuries and a subsequent offensive slump led to the Chanticleers’ first extended winless streak of the fall.

The Chants were hoping to rebuild momentum in the Big South tournament this week, but instead they were handed perhaps their toughest loss yet on Tuesday night.

No. 6-seeded High Point scored the tying goal with 27 seconds left in regulation to eventually force a 1-1 draw before prevailing 4-2 in penalty kicks against No. 3 Coastal Carolina in the opening round of the conference tournament.

Now the Chants (12-2-4) will have to wait for the NCAA tournament selection show Monday to learn if they are in the 48-team field for the sixth season in a row.

“I think every game you try to learn, and the process is important,” Coastal Carolina coach Shaun Docking said. “I just said to them, ‘We’ve got to find a way to get goals.’ We got our only goal off a set piece. We had some chances through the run of play and we weren’t able to get a second goal, and they stayed in the game and to their credit they got a goal with 30 seconds left in the game. It’s tough when you can’t score goals in games like this. ...

“So [it’s] disappointing, but again, what can you do? At this point of the season you’ve just got to keep pushing, keep persevering and just find different ways to get goals.”

Since leading scorer Bryce Follensbee was lost for the season to a knee injury Oct. 28, the Chants closed the regular season with an 0-1-2 stretch while being held scoreless in all three games.

They managed a goal early in the second half Tuesday night when senior midfielder Colin Marz headed a ball off the left post and sophomore midfielder Louis Dargent scored for a 1-0 lead in the 54th minute.

And it looked like that might be all the Chants would need against High Point (7-6-6), but in the 90th minute Chris Ramsell scored the equalizer for the visiting Panthers as junior goalkeeper Fernando Pina lost his footing on the slick field.

“Mistakes happen, I slipped and we can all see the conditions. It’s not an excuse,” Pina said.

Said Marz: “It’s just unlucky. Everybody really could have done something better on it. It was just a string of mistakes; it can’t just be Pina’s fault. It’s everybody’s fault really. We should have handled game management better toward the end of the game, getting it into the corners, so it’s just unfortunate.”

After two scoreless overtime periods, the teams went to a five-round shootout. Pina made one nice save to keep his team in it, but the Chants had two misses as junior midfielder Sergio Camargo and junior defender Einar Einarsson both sailed their attempts over the crossbar.

It’s the first time since 2000 that the Chants have been eliminated in the Big South quarterfinals.

Coastal Carolina was ranked as high as No. 15 in one national poll this week and had climbed as high as No. 4 earlier in the season. Docking and the players were optimistic that the team’s overall resume will be enough to earn a spot in the NCAA tournament, but they won’t know for sure until Monday now.

“I think it is, yeah, but there’s a lot of other games going on now in the next week, so now the RPI is going to be bumping around and we could certainly go down in the RPI,” Docking said. “[It’s just a matter of] how much are we going to go down. So we don’t know. Fingers crossed, hopefully we’re in, but we’ll see.”

Said Marz: “We hope that all the work we put in in the beginning of the season and getting good results then will hold up for us and make it so that we can get in the tournament, but it’s just a waiting game for us at this point. So we’ll get back at it and just wait and see.”

This story was originally published November 10, 2015 at 11:23 PM with the headline "CCU men’s soccer team stunned in Big South quarterfinals."