MORGANTOWN — When the No. 3 West Virginia men’s soccer team takes the field at Dick Dlesk Soccer Stadium on Thursday night against Purdue Fort Wayne for its 2024 season opener at 7 p.m., head coach Dan Stratford asks that his players remember one thing — last season’s chapter in the book of WVU men’s soccer has closed. The 64th season begins on a clean page.
The 2024 team is tasked with following in the footsteps of the most-successful year in WVU men’s soccer history. After a 17-3-4 season that saw a record number of victories and its highest-ever finish in the NCAA tournament with a berth in the 2024 Men’s College Cup, Stratford wants his players to keep one question on their minds when the whistle blows on Thursday to usher in the new campaign.
“It’s something we brought up in the first meeting with the team, and that’s what do we want this season to look like,” Stratford said Monday via Zoom. “There were just so many milestones and achievements from last season that it would be easy to fall victim to comparing ourselves to last year. We made it very clear that we are not chasing our past this season. We have to make our own path this season. The last thing I want is if we are not 15 games unbeaten to start the year, we somehow judge that as a failure because we were last season. It is just not realistic to try and look that way.”
The 2024 Mountaineers return a plethora of experience and talent from last season’s College Cup participants. Eight of the 11 players that started the national semifinals against Clemson, a 1-0 defeat, return for Stratford and his crew.
The most-anticipated return is that of 2023 All-American Marcus Caldeira, who scored 12 goals in 24 appearances last season. Caldeira is the Sun Belt Conference Preseason Player of the Year for the upcoming season. He returns to Morgantown despite Minnesota United selecting him 20th overall (the highest in WVU men’s program history) in the Major League Soccer SuperDraft in December.
“Marcus was on the radar of several clubs very, very quickly. I think he had seven goals after six games, and the phones were starting to ring to some extent,” Stratford said. “It was quite an extended process. I give Marcus a ton of credit because of how he navigated it. You have to understand that Marcus was being bandied around as a potential number-one pick, and he was still 18. There was a lot of pressure on him.”
Senior Dyon Dromers will return for the Mountaineers after missing the entirety of 2023 with injury, and a pair of inter-conference transfers with 2023 all-conference recognition in first-team selection Ethan Dekel Daks from South Carolina and third-teamer Simon Carlson from Georgia State are sure to bring some quality support.
Stratford said the 2024 freshman class has played well so far but admits that minutes may be difficult to come by in their first season in Morgantown with the amount of talent returning from a year ago.
“It would be logical to say that the opportunities are few and far between,” he said. “But genuinely, we have an excellent group that has come in here and are going to push some of those returning players and some of those who did very well for me last season for their positions.”
WVU will begin the 2024 campaign with three-consecutive home matches at Dick Dlesk Soccer Stadium, where it was unbeaten in 2023, starting Thursday with Purdue Fort Wayne at 7 p.m. The Mountaineers will host Saint Francis on Monday, Aug. 26, at 7 p.m., before capping off the home stand with George Washington on Friday, Aug. 30, again at 7 p.m.
The following two non-conference matches will see WVU travel west to play two teams from California, including last season’s Elite Eight opponent, Loyola Marymount, whom WVU defeated to punch its ticket to the College Cup.
Stratford and company will open SBC conference play with a road test at Old Dominion on Sept. 21 before hosting Kentucky, who defeated WVU, 1-0, a season ago, in Morgantown on Sept. 27.
The Mountaineers will conclude the regular season on the road against Marshall in Huntington on Tuesday, Nov. 5.
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