Matador Soccer Becoming Near-Sighted

Cal State Northridge staggered to a 2-16 record in women’s soccer this season.

Plagued by injuries, Northridge lacked talent even when the sick ward was empty. The Matadors are a combined 14-40-4 and have posted a worse record in each of their three seasons.

The schedule has been upgraded each year, but so has the team’s scholarship budget. A lackluster bunch split more than $85,000 worth of education this season.

Northridge’s 1997 roster features only four local players, but Coach Brian Wiesner said he will concentrate on nearby talent as he enters his second full recruiting season.

“The word we were getting before was that [local high school players] wanted to go away to college,” Wiesner said. “But the word we’ve gotten in the last two or three months is that there’s a good handful of high school seniors who want to come here. We’re going to try and be a home-grown program.”

On a campus of more than 25,000 students in an area with outstanding club soccer programs, Wiesner knows potential starters walk past him every day.

But he said his limited budget has hurt his recruiting efforts.

“Our recruiting budget is whatever’s left [from the team’s operating funds] at the end of the year,” said Wiesner, who does not have a full-time assistant coach. “That’s not much. We can’t fly [recruits] in and put them up and show them around. They have to come on their own dime. We can’t send out a lot of mailings and I don’t have the budget to call 15 or 20 [recruits] once a week.”

The local angle looks better, but Wiesner said he doesn’t expect to land any top-notch players.

“With USC and UCLA in town, Northridge sometimes gets the leftovers,” Wiesner said. “We’re not going to get the blue chips but we need to get kids who want to make the sacrifices to stay competitive with the better programs.”