The NCAA News - News and Features

The NCAA News -- July 5, 1999

Championships Year in Review -- Florida women interrupt North Carolina soccer dynasty

BY KAY HAWES
STAFF WRITER

Only a handful of teams have ever even contended for the Division I Women's Soccer Championship, and practically every year before now, the winners wore Carolina blue and white.

How then did the Florida Gators wrest the title from the 14-time title holder, North Carolina?

And how did the Gators -- in only their fourth year of existence -- break into such an elite circle of contenders?

It wasn't easy, but it helps to have the NCAA's all-time leading scorer on your squad. Danielle Fotopoulos -- now on the U.S. World Cup team -- posted the game-winning goal in the sixth minute of play.

How amazing was it that Florida took the title? The facts speak for themselves. The Tar Heels came into the game with a 70-match unbeaten streak, and they had won all but two of the NCAA Division I titles since the tournament's inception in 1982 (George Mason won in 1985 and Notre Dame in 1995).

Earlier in the season, North Carolina defeated Florida, 2-1, in Gainesville, and the Tar Heels had been the team that eliminated the Gators from each of the previous two NCAA tournaments.

Also, North Carolina allowed only five goals total in all of their 15 previous appearances in the final game.

Anson Dorrance, the North Carolina coach who has led the Tar Heels to all of their previous NCAA championships, acknowledged that Florida's win was an incredible feat for such a young program.

"With women's soccer being such a growing sport and the players being spread out the way they are, it's a tremendous accomplishment for the University of Florida to win a title so quickly," Dorrance said.

A record-breaking crowd of 10,583 fans saw the 1-0 match, after which the Gator's Becky Burleigh became the first woman to coach a women's soccer team to the NCAA Division I title.

"I don't think it has sunk in," Burleigh said. "To come full circle, from nothing four years ago (when the program started), it's amazing."

Burleigh also points out that while it helps to have a blue-chip player like Fotopoulos, much of the credit for the program's quick success goes to the Florida athletics department and to the players in her first recruiting class at Florida.

"We had a tremendous amount of support from our athletics department," she said. "And we had players who believed it was possible. We brought them in and told them about the winning traditions of other sports at Florida, and they believed it could happen.

"While having Danielle (Fotopoulos) may have sped the process up a bit because she also attracted other top players, I really think we had a core group of seniors who came here, stuck with it and really made an effort to continue to get better.

"They believed it could happen -- and it did."