SCH superstriker McCool signs with UVA

Posted 2/8/16

With her parents alongside her last Wednesday morning, SCH senior Meghan McCool signed a National Letter of Intent to play soccer at the University of Virginia. (Photo by Aimee Keough) by Tom …

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SCH superstriker McCool signs with UVA

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With her parents alongside her last Wednesday morning, SCH senior Meghan McCool signed a National Letter of Intent to play soccer at the University of Virginia. (Photo by Aimee Keough) With her parents alongside her last Wednesday morning, SCH senior Meghan McCool signed a National Letter of Intent to play soccer at the University of Virginia. (Photo by Aimee Keough)
by Tom Utescher Ever since she first began to make her mark on Inter-Ac League soccer as a freshman at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, the defensive priority for opposing teams has simply been this: stop Meghan McCool. Or at least try. Now a senior at the local school, McCool can look back on a high school career in which she was marked by multiple players almost every time out. The Blue Devils had few other soccer specialists, few seasoned players who could draw some attention away from the 5’8” striker. Still, McCool amassed an astounding career total of 136 goals and 37 assists. Blessed with natural scoring instincts, she worked to hone her skills for many years in elite club programs, and as a senior she’s been a member of both the U.S. Under-19 and Under-20 teams. It’s no wonder that last Wednesday she signed a National Letter of Intent to play for one of the most successful and prestigious programs in women’s college soccer, the University of Virginia Cavaliers. “The first thing you notice about Meghan is that she’s a true athlete and she’s got a competitive fire in her belly,” observed longtime UVA head coach Steve Swanson. “She’s made an obvious impact at every level she’s played at, and even more, she still has the potential to grow. To compete at our level, you have to be a certain caliber of athlete, and Meghan’s not only got the size and the speed, she’s got some very good agility and really good instincts. All of those things bode well for her future, and we couldn’t be more excited to have her be part of our incoming class.” Without exception, opposing coaches wish she were theirs. The mentor of 2015 Pa. Independent Schools champion Germantown Academy, Chris Nelson, remarked “As a fan of the game of soccer, I would say she’s been the best player in our league certainly for the past two years, and one of the best one or two all four years she’s been in high school.” He elaborated, “She’s big, she’s strong, she’s smart, she works hard, she plays defense, and obviously, she plays offense. From an outsider’s perspective, she seems like an absolute dream to coach, not only for her skill, but for her work ethic and her attitude.” Long before she began to play high school soccer, McCool caused concern for rival club teams. After her initial travel team years she joined the West Chester United Soccer Club at around 12 years of age, starting out with a squad called the Predators that eventually evolved into the highly-successful Penn Fusion. Her coach throughout her WCU tenure, Tino Mueller, observed that from the outset, “The way she played the game she was a born striker, with that desire to have an impact and score goals no matter who the opponent is. You have to have that mentality of ‘I don’t walk off the field today without a goal.’ It’s something that Meghan has always had, and that any coach would recognize.” McCool’s athletic inclination runs in the family. Her mother, Rachel, played collegiate field hockey and won a national championship in lacrosse at Ursinus College. Her father, Tim, played rugby for much of his life, and a glimpse of the physicality of that sport can be seen by watching his daughter play soccer. McCool’s older brother, Will, played soccer and was a football placekicker at Springside Chestnut Hill, and he has parleyed his foot skills into becoming the primary kicker for the football squad at Hobart William Smith, where he is a sophomore. When they were very young, they played some sports together around home, but soon Will became heavily invested in baseball. They both are avid snowboarders, plying the slopes near the McCools’ home in the Pocono Mountains. The UVA recruit recalled, “I think I started playing soccer at about five years old in little rec leagues, and for a long time I was a goalie.” In this role, her manual dexterity served her youth teams well, but in some ways it stifled her natural tendencies. “The reason I liked soccer was because I always had a lot of energy and I liked to run around. I’m a really aggressive player, and some of the other sports seemed to be all about finesse and you couldn’t really touch anybody. Another thing I liked about soccer is that no matter how good you were, there was always another level and you could be better. There was always something more to learn, some way to progress.” After playing locally for the Springfield Township organization up to the Under-10 level, she took up with the storied Lighthouse Soccer Club in Northeast Philadelphia. “They let me get out of the goal cage and onto the field more,” she remembered. “I’m very competitive, and to win in soccer you have to score goals, which is something I wanted to do. I was still sort of splitting time between being a goalie and a striker, though.” When she was around 10 years old, she met Mark Thomas, a coach and instructor who was then working with the Philadelphia-based Starfinder Foundation. He also was the coaching director for boys’ soccer at West Chester United, and he suggested that she should come out to Chester County for some trial training sessions. Eventually she did, and discovered “I loved the girls and the professionalism of the coaches. The training and the playing and everything was at a higher pace, and I really felt challenged and excited.” It was not exactly geographically convenient though. She said, “I owe my parents a lot for making the huge commitment to always drive me an hour each way for a lot of years, before I could drive myself.” Despite her earlier experiments in the goal cage, when she came under Tino Mueller’s scrutiny at West Chester United, he recalled, “From the beginning when I trained her and saw her play, there was no question that she should play forward. She was sort of a pioneer in being the first player in our group who came from outside of the West Chester area, and then other players followed later on.” Assessing McCool’s soccer skills, he said, “Is she the most technical player in the world? No. She was always strong, fast, and tough, and she has worked hard to improve her skills over the years. We worked with her on her ability to receive the ball in space, and on when and how to make the proper runs. “She never missed a session and she always had a good attitude about training any time of the year,” Mueller went on. “She was coming out always looking to get better. By nature she had a dominant right foot, but she worked on her left so that now she can absolutely finish with either foot, which makes her shot hard to predict. She’s tough physically and mentally, and she’s very steady emotionally, very down-to-earth.” When she became a teenager, she earned a position on both state and regional teams for U.S. Soccer’s Olympic Development Program (ODP). During her sophomore year in high school, her Penn Fusion team made it through to the major Club Champions League tournament in Richmond, Va. One of her Fusion teammates is Phoebe McClernon, a senior at the Academy of Notre Dame who has also signed with UVA. McCool entered Springside Chestnut Hill Academy in seventh grade, where she started out playing soccer, basketball, and lacrosse in the middle school program. Basketball fell by the wayside when she progressed to upper school, and she laid down her lacrosse stick after her 10th-grade season. Her extracurricular soccer activities had just become too demanding, and she knew now that she was justified in aspiring to play top flight college ball. Not surprisingly, some of the players McCool looks up to are U.S. National Team stars. “I’ve always liked Alex Morgan because she plays my position,” she said, “and I also like Julie Johnson, who’s the center back on the U.S. Team. I like her style of play, and how composed she is for someone who’s still pretty young.”
 Blue Devils soccer star Meghan McCool (left) battles past a defender from Inter-Ac League champion Episcopal Academy. (Photo by Tom Utescher)
Blue Devils soccer star Meghan McCool (left) battles past a defender from Inter-Ac League champion Episcopal Academy. (Photo by Tom Utescher)
In addition to her club team commitments outside of school, McCool works on general physical conditioning with one set of trainers, and drills specifically on soccer skills with Craig Reed, the director of Soccer 360, an instructional program based in Chester County. A math and science enthusiast in the classroom, she even found a way to work her athletic passion into her academic curriculum. “We had a long project, about five months, when I experimented with some scientific aspects of shooting,” she explained. “I figured out things like the best type of cleats to use when shooting a ball, what would give you the greatest distance, what angle you should strike the ball.” When asked if any of this was leading toward a specific major in college, she was firmly noncommittal. She’ll figure that out, in time. Did the young scoring phenom ever consider switching to a school with a more high-profile successful soccer program? “I knew I’d always get to play high-level soccer with Penn Fusion and other teams, so I didn’t think there was a need for me to be playing on the strongest high school team around,” she replied. “My brother was at SCH most of the time I was here, and I really loved the school and my friends. Also, I’ve missed time in school with my travelling for soccer, and my teachers here have been very understanding and helped me keep up with my classwork.” As someone with such a passion for the game, it wasn’t easy at first for McCool to understand the point of view of some schoolmates who were playing soccer simply to satisfy school activities requirements. “I think mentally that was a big thing for me,” she admitted. “I’m very competitive, so it was difficult to deal with the idea that some of the kids were only there because they had to be. As I became closer with people on the team, I started to understand their point of view a little better. It was frustrating sometimes, but I learned to take a deep breath and settle down.” In recent years, a few more talented soccer-specific athletes have joined the program at Springside Chestnut Hill, which encouraged McCool. As colleges began to court her early in her high school career, she realized that everyone she’d be playing with at the next level would share her commitment to the game, and that helped, too. She began to seriously scrutinize colleges as a sophomore; a moderate climate factored into her search and all but one school that made it onto her short list was located south of the Mason Dixon line. “Virginia was my last visit and up until then I was really undecided,” related the sought-after scorer. “When I got there I loved everything about it. It wasn’t even a question anymore – I just knew that was where I wanted to be.” She made a verbal commitment to the Cavaliers while she was still in 10th grade. Of course, as a freshman she had already been named the Inter-Ac League’s Most Valuable Player, a title she would recapture as a senior. Back in her Inter-Ac varsity soccer debut in the fall of 2012, McCool had furnished the lone goal in the Blue Devils’ 1-0 victory over the Academy of Notre Dame. Unfortunately, additional league victories would not be easy to come by for the SCH squad, even with McCool spearheading the attack. The best results the franchise achieved were a 3-9 record in 2014, when McCool scored 55 goals in and out of the Inter-Ac, and a 2-8-2 mark in her senior season last fall, when she drilled 40 goals and had seven assists. Despite the Blue Devils’ difficulties, Germantown Academy’s Nelson pointed out, “She never gave up on them, which was admirable. You never saw her go out there and just go through the motions; she always played to beat you. She was a good sportswoman, always gracious before and after a game.” McCool missed a few high school matches early in her senior season while she was in Central America playing with the national Under-20’s. She wasn’t on hand for the first of the three games that SCH would play against independent schools champ GA. When McCool did square off against the Patriots, they had some strong players to go up against the SCH standout, including Duke recruit Mackenzie Pluck, a sophomore. “With Meghan, you always want to limit her open looks, force her way outside, contest her shots, and make her shoot at an awkward angle,” Coach Nelson said. “My stats show that in the two games she played against us this season we managed to hold her to five shots where she had a good look at the goal. On those five shots she scored twice, hit the left post, hit the crossbar, and on the fifth shot our goalie Kat made the save of the year on her. That’s extremely impressive.” Penn Fusion’s Mueller remarked, “Even at the highest club level she sometimes may have two defenders on her, but she always finds a way to make something happen. Meghan doesn’t have that side noise a lot of people have, she just stays focused. She’s also fearless out there, she’ll go in and put her body on the line and she doesn’t care.” Asked how he thinks McCool will fare in major Division I college competition, her club coach pointed out, “When a top program like UVA seeks you out, they obviously believe that you can play at their level. It won’t be easy for her right away - she’ll have to adjust – but I have no doubt that Meghan will find a way to play a role pretty quickly. With her work rate, her dedication, and her desire, I think she’ll show everyone at UVA that she’s not there to sit on the bench.” The Cavaliers’ Swanson said, “I see areas where she can improve – I think she knows that – and to me it’s a good sign when a player impacts a game as much as she does and still can get better in some aspects of the sport. She just needs to work on the technical side of things so that she can manage the game at the college level. There’s not going to be as much space to work, there’s not going to be as much time, and the defense is going to be better organized.” Soccer specialists who rate college recruiting classes feel that the bunch now bound for Charlottesville is loaded, a group of young women that could help propel the Cavs to an NCAA title. Through almost the entire 2014 and 2015 seasons, Virginia held the number one ranking in the nation, but fell in the national championship game in 2014 and was eliminated a little earlier last fall in nine rounds of penalty kicks. “It was a disappointing way to end the season,” Swanson said, “but I told our players that I was very proud of the investment that they made, and continue to make, in our program. I feel Meghan is a player who will also make that investment. Soccer can be a difficult game and it’s players with true persistence who will make it in the end, and Meghan’s got that inside of her. I think she’ll thrive here in an environment that will challenge her to grow and develop, and that’s why she’s a really good match for our program.”
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