I will say this. I was never much of a soccer person growing up but since my daughter started playing travel soccer this past year in Virginia, I can say they run some great programs here.
have a lot of kids from Virginia, where as you say, the quality of soccer is good--both in Richmond and in northern Virginia. I live in the state and see some good ECNL games occasionally.
I was hoping Pensky could land Jordan Canniff, who is a top 5 player nationally in the 2019 or 2020 class and who has played a lot with two of our new signees, Paige Franks and McKinley Burkett, on a Richmond United ECNL team, but she has committed to Pa. State. (The quality of players that the big dogs get--pa. state, stanford, unc, ucla, in particular--is depressing.) Franks was actually supposed to be in our 2018 class but somehow has been reclassified academically and is joining us early--and Burkett has only just turned 17. Pensky has improved the talent at UT significantly over the last four years.
We had a commitment in this class from an excellent player in Maryland---maybe the best four-year prospect in the class--but she reneged and signed with Wisconsin. That was a tough loss.
We lost a player who would have been a senior next year--Carlyn Baldwin, who came to UT (from northern VA) three years ago as a highly rated prospect with U20 U.S. National Team experience (like Katie Cousins). Baldwin was effective as a freshman but not effective as a soph and junior, though she played a lot. I think she got word that her playing time was going to be significantly reduced this year. That's informed speculation. She's now playing with a professional women's team in Switzerland, which sounds like a great adventure, at the least. Baldwin might make a good coach down the road.
You've almost got to recruit some international players nowadays. Florida State and West Virginia have a bunch and they've made those programs very good. I think the NCAA should set a limit of, say, 3 foreign-born players, but that hasn't been done yet. About a third of west virginia's starters last year were from Canada, and that team was very good. Probably should have won the national title but got beat in the championship game by Southern Cal. We've just signed a transfer from Jamaica who could be a very good player--tall, rangy and killed. I think she's got two years of eligibility.
I think Pensky has a chance to build an excellent program at Tennessee, but he's got to improve our possession play. We actually had a pretty good team by the end of last year--but we didn't make the NCAA tourney again because we had a bad start of the season and we couldn't get a result against any of the top teams we played. Maybe this year will be different. We'll be talented but with Hannah Wilkinson gone we will need to replace her scoring. We've got a lot of good or potentially good midfielders, so it will be interesting to see if Pensky sticks with the 4-3-3 formation that he prefers. He probably will.
