For all of its seven non-conference games, three of which will be exhibitions, Dayton is staying close to home and not staying overnight if the game is on the road. It has matches scheduled at Miami on Feb. 23 and at Ohio on March 1.
The eight-game Atlantic 10 Conference schedule, which has not been officially announced, will also look different with the 14 teams dividing into three pods. Dayton will be in a four-team pod with Saint Louis, Duquesne and Saint Bonaventure. Those teams will play only each other in the regular season. The three pod champions plus one more team with the most points will advance to the A-10 tournament.
All of that is less important than the simple fact that the Flyers are playing at all.
“We’re extremely grateful for the opportunity to get back on the field again,” fourth-year coach Eric Golz said. “We’re grateful to be back on campus training for games. Obviously, some sports didn’t have that opportunity. It’s been a while. We’re all a little eager, excited and a little rusty. The university has done a really great job of giving us the opportunity to play non-conference and conference games. It’s not going to be normal by any stretch of the imagination, but the key for our players, their big want, their big ask was, ‘Allow us to compete. Allow us to get back on the field.’”
Dayton did its best to get some work done in the fall, not knowing for certain there would be a season in the winter/spring.
“It was interesting,” Golz said. “Everyone was going through similar challenges. How can we safely navigate training in the COVID environment? It was kind of walk-crawl-run mentality in terms of how we how we began training. We had an acclimation period where we had to kind of re-acclimate to the competition and training. We really managed the workloads. We were very cautious to not have athletics be the the source of an outbreak on campus. People were really mindful of that. We didn’t want to do anything to harm the greater good. We had a long period of kind of socially-distanced small group training. Then we were able to get into larger numbers and remove the contact restrictions to get a couple of weeks of training and before people went home for the break.”
Dayton finished 7-9-3 overall and 5-3-2 in the A-10 in 2019. That was a slight improvement in the conference after a 4-5-1 finish in 2018.
One of the top returners is sophomore midfielder Alexis Goins. She led the team in goals (seven) and points (17) as a freshman and made the All-A-10 first team. Sophomore Laney Huber, who had four goals and four assists in 2019, also returns.
“We’re a really young team. Two thirds of our team are freshmen and sophomores. Last year, our now sophomore class got a lot of experience as freshmen. I think we’ll see a number of those players step up and be good leaders.”
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