The North Carolina Tar Heels have won more women’s soccer titles than all other college teams combined. This year’s NCAA championship, however, may have been the unlikeliest in the program’s storied history.
UNC beat Wake Forest, 1-0, on Monday, to win the 22nd NCAA Tournament in school history. A total of 43 women’s College Cups have been played, and the Tar Heels are the only team to participate in all of them. Up until this season, each of those appearances and titles had come under the guidance of the same man—head coach Anson Dorrance.
Dorrance had built a true dynasty in Chapel Hill, but it had fallen on leaner times as the sport grew across the nation. Despite playing in five of the last seven College Cups, which include the national semifinals and title game, UNC had been mired in the longest championship drought in program history—12 seasons.
This offseason, the team endured a mass exodos that saw nine players transfer, 11 go pro and a total of 21 players leave the program. Plus, three expected incoming freshmen also opted to turn professional instead.
“We had a complete rebuild,” said sophomore Olivia Thomas, one of the few Tar Heels that stuck around after last season. “We had 12 people left. We called it the great migration.”
UNC restocked its roster with transfers, then, on the eve of the season, the team suffered its greatest departure of all when Dorrance announced in mid-August that he was retiring.
Damon Nahas, a UNC assistant since 2015, took over as interim head coach and has made his case that he’s deserving of the permanent gig.
“All the transfers came in,” Thomas said. “We meshed together. It could have gone in any direction, but here we are.”
The Tar Heels are in the position they are in large part due to Thomas. She scored off a free kick in the 62nd minute of the title game for the only goal of the contest. It was her ninth goal of the season. Four of them came in the NCAA Tournament, including two in the College Cup.
The College Cup was an all-ACC affair, as UNC and Wake were joined by a third team from the state in Duke. Stanford, the ACC’s newest member, rounded out the women’s soccer Final Four.
Looking for their fourth national title, Stanford fell to the Demon Deacons in the first national semifinal. Emily Morris scored the game’s only goal in the 73rd minute to send Wake Forest to its first-ever national title game.
Wake was making its first appearance in the College Cup and was one of the year’s surprise teams, competing for a title after finishing sixth in the ACC last year and getting left out of the NCAA Tournament.
UNC, meanwhile, dispatched with top seed Duke, 3-0, avenging two regular-season losses—the first time the Blue Devils had ever swept the Heels in the regular season. Kate Faasse scored on a penalty kick to put the Heels on top. It was her 20th goal of the year, the most in the nation and most by a UNC player since 2008. The junior was, like Thomas, one of the holdover players from last year.
Thomas added a goal later in the first half, and another returnee, Maddie Dahlien, added the final score in the second half.
The game closed the books on another coaching legend. Duke’s Robbie Church retired following the game, closing his career with 398 wins and turning the program over to assistant Kieran Hall. The Blue Devils were making their fifth appearance in the Cup and first since 2017.
The semifinal results set up the first NCAA title game between teams from the state since 1992, when the Tar Heels, coached by Dorrance and led by star player Mia Hamm, beat Duke, 9-1.
The story of the Cup, however, was the Tar Heels’ improbable run to the title. Thomas was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Offensive Player. Goalkeeper Clare Gagne, an offseason grad transfer from Brown, was Most Outstanding Defensive Player, the first UNC goalie to earn that honor since 1997.
Freshmen Trinity Armstrong and Linda Ullmark were named to the All-Tournament team.
Nehas became the second coach in women’s soccer history to win a title in his first year at the helm, joining UCLA’s Margueritte Aozasa, who did it in 2022. He is also the fourth UNC coach to win a title in any sport in his first season.
