The Old Dominion Athletic Conference (ODAC) announced their 2021 Men's Soccer Preseason Poll on Thursday afternoon. Roanoke College received one (1) first-place vote en route to being picked third in the poll, as voted on by the league's 12 coaches.
The fall 2021 campaign will be the first rull season since then Maroons earned a berth in the 2019 NCAA DIII Men's Soccer Championship Tournament. This past spring, in an abbreviated schedule due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Roanoke posted a 3-1-4 overall record and made it to the semifinals of the ODAC Men's Soccer Championships before being knocked out, on penalty kicks, by Guilford. Head coach Ryan Pflugrad returns an experienced roster that includes five All ODAC performers from 2020 and seven players that have earned All ODAC honors at some point during their careers. On defense, Joe Carman returns, after not only being named all conference, but being tabbed by the Virginia Sports Information directors (VaSID) as their 2020 Defensive Player of the Year, to anchor a back line that was the best in the league a season ago. Joining Carman are defender Chris Jerrild and goalkeeper Zach Behe. Up front, the Maroons will be led by Liam Camilleri and Isaac Wolf while Alec Taitague and Dylan Berk bring more ODAC hardware to the midfield.
Roanoke will embark on a month of September that will see six of their first nine matches played away from the friendly confines of Kerr Stadium. After opening the season at home against Greensboro, the Maroons will see just only Methodist and North Carolina Wesleyan in Salem. Road matches against Salisbury, Mary Washington, and Emory (Ga.) will allow Roanoke to face some of the best competition that the NCAA has to offer all before traveling to Randolph-Macon for their ODAC opener on the 28th. The home portion of the ODAC schedule gets started with a visit from Eastern Mennionite on October 1st. Lynchburg comes calling five days later and the Maroons will look to exact a bit of revenge on the Quakers when Guilford comes to Salem to wrap up the regular season on October 26th.
