ACU director of athletics Jared Mosley wasted little time in finding someone to lead the program, naming current assistant softball coach Casey Wilson as the women's head soccer coach.  He will finish the 2005-06 school year as the assistant softball coach (his wife, Chantiel, is the head coach), and will then assume the duties as the head soccer coach on June 1, 2006.

 

The women's soccer program will be the 14th sport in the ACU athletics program and means ACU will have seven men's sports and seven women's sports.

 

"The addition of a women's soccer program is something that has been talked about for quite some time," Mosley said.  "Over the last several years we've had numerous inquiries about the possible addition from a number of potential female students, and it finally reached the point where we thought the interest level was high enough to add the program."

 

The NCAA Division II limit on scholarships for women's soccer is 9.9, but Mosley said ACU would fund three full scholarships the first year.  He said the goal over the first "three or four years" of the program's existence would be to have a regular progression of scholarships to a level comparable to other teams in the Lone Star Conference.  At the NCAA Division II level, those scholarships can be divided up at the coach's discretion.
The addition of women's soccer was green-lighted after Mosley made proposals to to the school's budget committee, planning committee and President's Cabinet.  All three bodies gave the go-ahead to add the world's most popular sport to the ACU lineup.

 

"The biggest thing that adding soccer does for us is that it meets a definite interest level from high school athletes who are looking at ACU as their college destination," said Mosley, who added that the roster size would fall somewhere between 25 and 30 players.  "And certainly it also helps us become more in line with Title IX compliance issues."

 

And while the Wildcats will be building a program from the ground up, Mosley said he expects the ACU environment to help attract potential student-athletes and make the Wildcats a winner early in the program's history.

 

"Anytime you're building something from the ground up and you're phasing in scholarships, you know going into it that it's going to be tough," Mosley said.  "But I believe we have enough outside interest that we'll be able to put a competitive team on the field pretty quickly.  And then I think we can grow it over the first two or three years into one of the top teams in the Lone Star Conference."

Wilson, the man charged with making that happen, was a standout club and high school soccer player while growing up in southern California.  He played for the Western Regional championship club team in 1989, a squad that finished with a 50-8 record.

 

While in high school at Canyon High School in Anaheim Hills, Calif., Wilson was a two-year letterwinner and a two-time all-conference player.  Wilson was a three-sport standout at Canyon High School in Anaheim Hills, Calif., before he attended Santa Ana College where he was an all-America placekicker in football.  He went on to play two years of football at Central Michigan University where in 1996 he set the school record for PATs in a season.

 

He transferred to ACU in 1998 and played baseball for head coach Britt Bonneau for two seasons.  He hit .300 in 1998 for
the Wildcats.  He graduated from ACU in 1999 with BBA in marketing.  He received his master's degree (MBA) in business with an emphasis in entrepreneurship from Concordia University in California.

 

His high school soccer coach, Ali Khosroshahin, is currently the head women's soccer coach at Cal State-Fullerton, which just completed the most successful season in program history with a 19-4 record.  The 15th-ranked Titans lost to No. 7 Virginia, 2-1, Monday night in the third round of the NCAA Division I national tournament.

 

It's those kind of contacts that Wilson believes will help him build a quality program at ACU.

 

"We're in the very early stages of trying to formulate how to put a team together," Wilson said.  "I've got a pretty good network of people that I've know for quite some time, and that should help us in the process of finding players.  We may well have an open tryout for on-campus players in the spring and begin working with that group next fall while we finish recruiting for our first season in 2007."

 

Wilson said one of his first priorities is to get a grasp on the competition in the Lone Star Conference.

 

"We've got to get caught up pretty quickly with the teams and the talent level in the Lone Star Conference," he said.  "One of the big advantages that we have is that we have about 18 months to go out and recruit and find the players who will fit at ACU and want to be here.  I think there's a lot of untapped potential in the Big Country and the surrounding area, and I'm looking forward to taking a look at a lot of those players."

 

* Currently there are 10 LSC teams that sponsor women's soccer.  After ACU starts, the only ones without women's soccer will be Cameron, Southeastern Oklahoma State, Tarleton State and Texas A&M-Kingsville.
* The LSC first sponsored women's soccer in 1996, and there were five teams (Angelo State, Midwestern State, Northeastern State, Texas A&M-Commerce, and West Texas A&M).  East Central added women's soccer in 1997, followed by Central Oklahoma and Southwestern Oklahoma State in 1998, Texas Woman's in 2002 and Eastern New Mexico in 2003.
* Central Oklahoma is the defending LSC regular-season and postseason tournament champion. The Bronchos were 8-0-1 in LSC games and 16-3-2 overall.  UCO defeated Midwestern State, 1-0, in this year's title game before losing in a penalty-kick tiebreaker to Regis at the NCAA Midwest Region Tournament.
* Currently the NCAA tournament includes 32 teams, four teams in each of eight regions.  LSC teams compete in the Midwest Region along with teams from the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference and Heartland Conference.  The LSC qualified a league-high three NCAA participants in 2003 and had two qualifiers in 2004 before being represented by only UCO this fall.
* LSC women's soccer teams play for a regular-season title and postseason tournament championship.  The tournament winner is technically known as the conference champion.
* LSC standings are determined on a point system with teams receiving three points for every LSC win and one point for every LSC tie.
* After the regular season, the top six teams qualify for a single-elimination postseason tournament. The 2006 tournament will be in Edmond, Okla., and the 2007 tournament will be hosted by the 2006 regular-season champion.
* Currently there are no automatic bids into the NCAA tournament for women's soccer.
* Four teams have dominated women's soccer during the 10 years that the LSC has sponsored the sport.  West Texas A&M and Central Oklahoma each have three league titles, while Midwestern State and Texas A&M-Commerce have two each to account for all 10.