Chris Gomez sat in Ian McIntyre’s office as a high school junior. In his first visit to Syracuse, Gomez remembers the head coach asking what he wanted to accomplish.

Gomez expressed aspirations of winning the Atlantic Coast Conference title and at least making the third round in the NCAA tournament, but recalls McIntyre responding, “Those are lofty goals. We can obviously compete, but those are lofty goals.”

Now, less than two years later and after the best season in SU soccer history, those benchmarks don’t seem so distant anymore.

“Now the mentality is, you know what, every year we’re going to compete for that ACC title,” said Gomez, SU’s top-ranked recruit in the Class of 2015, according to College Soccer News. “We should be winning it and we can obviously compete for the national title now.”

The 2014 season changed Syracuse soccer. The Orange has ascended from a national bottom-feeder at the beginning of McIntyre’s tenure to the borderline of the ACC tournament and now, after the head coach’s fifth year, SU is developing into a top-ranked program.

This offseason has seen Syracuse lose 13 players for multiple reasons, but its incoming class boasts a dozen recruits to counter that. Six of the departures have shown that a season of success provides a platform to jumpstart professional endeavors. The mass additions are a result of the product McIntyre now has showcased to recruits, something he didn’t have at his disposal before.

And though the feel around the program is still the same for the head coach, there’s no denying one season changed the perception of a once-irrelevant team.

“I think we’re moving in the right direction,” McIntyre said. “It was a wonderful ride and a great journey.”

For former goalkeeper Alex Bono, the sense that something special was going to ensue wasn’t when SU hung tight with then-No. 4 Notre Dame in the fifth game of the season or even when it knocked off then-No. 2 Virginia in the ninth.

It was before the Orange even stepped on the field for a regular-season game.

“I would even put it back to preseason,” Bono said. “We had a great senior group that knew this was their last year and they really wanted to make something of it.”

That senior class, whose core included Skylar Thomas, Jordan Murrell, Tyler Hilliard and Chris Makowski, were what McIntyre called the “cultural architects” during his tenure.

That culture was something that transformed this past season, whether it showed by spectators watching games from beyond the field’s fence or by McIntyre getting congratulated for the atmosphere at the ACC tournament quarterfinal while getting breakfast.

And the manifestation of that buzz surrounding the program was the result of a simple motto: “Why not?”

Bono said that exact phrase nine times in 37 seconds in an interview on Tuesday, explaining how the team used that mentality in 2012 to forget a 3-12-1 campaign the season before. It did the same to try and emerge into the ACC in 2013. And after a mediocre 2013, Bono said the mood was, “Why not turn it around?”

Syracuse made the ACC tournament semifinals, the NCAA tournament third round and was ranked in the Top 10 from Sept. 30 to the final postseason rankings on Dec. 16 — including two weeks at No. 1.

On one end, it’s given six players the exposure to turn pro, which Bono called “unheard of” from a college program after one season. In addition to himself, Thomas and Murrell going to the MLS, Nick Perea, Stefanos Stamoulacatos and Emil Ekblom are playing professionally elsewhere.

“People were starting to take Syracuse soccer more seriously,” Ekblom said. “More talent wanting to go to Syracuse now that they know that a bunch of guys made in through to the professional level.”

And talent is exactly what McIntyre and his staff have attracted. But in the midst of all the departures, Gomez and several other commits in a group chat were shocked and didn’t know what was going to happen next.

“I wonder what they’re going to do because right now we have like a five-man recruiting class,” Gomez recalled thinking. “Out of nowhere, there’s just a bunch of more guys.”

That total has capped at 12 and it’s the No. 8 recruiting class in the country according to College Soccer News. It’s something McIntyre said is a product of him having a tangible 16-win season to show recruits rather than just saying he hopes for one.

Now that the groundwork for national prominence has been established, McIntyre acknowledged it’s a challenge to fulfill the newfound expectations surrounding Syracuse soccer, but ones he is willing to embrace.

And just more than a full season after SU’s top recruit sat in his future coach’s office, those lofty expectations have now become more realistic.

Said Gomez: “Everything just kind of changed really rapidly this past season.”

Published on April 21, 2015 at 9:30 pm

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