Lincoln, Nebraska for the 2023 college soccer tournament 2nd round

Last weekend, I traveled to Lincoln, Nebraska for the second round of the college women’s soccer championship tournament.  The University of Nebraska hosted two games on Friday, and I attended both.  This trip was a part of my school “sabbatical”, in which I’ve been traveling the country to see women’s soccer.  I’ll also be heading to the College Cup semifinals in December in Cary, North Carolina.  

I’d been to Lincoln back in 1999-2004 for the AP physics reading.  I didn’t get very far off campus in those years, ‘cause we had everything we needed right there; because I didn’t have a car; because I didn’t have the money to do anything expensive, including eating at restaurants.  Good news was, the food in the dining hall was amazing.  Every year, the first night we arrived we were given the choice of shrimp scampi or a bacon-wrapped filet.  And my request of “both, please” was always met with an enthusiastic smile.  Ah, the good ol’ days.  

Back then, we were bussed in from Omaha, 1.5 hours away.  This time, I flew straight to Lincoln’s airport, so a 10-minute Lyft ride got me to the hotel that was a short walk from the stadium.

First game: Gonzaga vs. UC Irvine.  I went in rooting for the UCI Anteaters over the Gonzaga Bulldogs, just because of the mascot.  (If Gonzaga had been the Huskies, I would have supported them.)  UCI went up very early with a goal from Aveka Singh - a junior from New Delhi, India.  I’m pretty sure the assist came from midfielder Tati Fung, who seemed the best player on the pitch.  When she had the ball, I had confidence in the Anteater attack.  

It was cold in Lincoln, at least cold for an outdoor spectator sport.  I wore like a thousand long sleeve shirts, thermal underwear, a parka, and my elephant hat.  Yes, my wife has knitted several animal hats for me, my favorite of which has elephant ears and a proboscis sticking out of the forehead.  Many, many Lincolnites admired my hat, but a good fraction thought it was an anteater in honor of UC Irvine.  

One man successfully identified the elephant, though, and told me so - he said he was a professor (of sociology) at UC Fullerton, whose mascot is an elephant.  He very much liked my hat.  Yet his daughter had become an anteater.  Go figure. 

The Anteater fans as a group - as a group of maybe 20 - were positive, enthusiastic, and kind.  They greeted their team enthusiastically after the game in the same way as a European team’s visiting support do, though with less drunken chanting.

UC Irvine had defeated national #1 UCLA in the first round, and were the underdog in this game against #8 Gonzaga.  Nevertheless, the Anteaters dominated the first half, slurping up a second early goal from Lilli Rask.  Gonzaga then grew into the game, finally breaking through five minutes before the half from freshperson Katelyn Rigg.*

*In the early 1990s, it seemed that a full third of the women I met at college were named some form of Cindy, or Cindi, or Cynthia, or Syndi, or similar.  Well, the same phenomenon in the 2020s seems to have shifted to Caitlyn, or Kaitlin, or… I suspect the latter to often be the offspring of the former.

It was a different first-year player, though, who was the danger woman for Gonzaga.  Emelia Warta kept gaining possession in advanced positions in midfield, after which she would rampage into the box.  Every time she touched the ball I expected her to create a chance. Warta and her team controlled the game more and more as the second half went on.

Yet the Anteaters weathered the storm, including a storm in which they themselves seeded the clouds - some dangerous passing under pressure in the back led to a giveaway and a ball cleared off the line with the goalkeeper out of her area.  Phew.  For the most part, UCI headed crosses away, got the ball to Fung in midfield, and passed out of trouble before trouble came right back toward them.

Tension mounted palpably as the clock ticked down* and Warta terrified the Anteaters as if she were a jaguar rather than a Bulldog.  In the last 15 minutes or so, the ball barely left the Anteaters’ half.  Yet a couple of final clearances through Fung sealed the deal.  And a couple dozen fans cheered.

*Yes, the college soccer clock counts down rather than up, ‘cause the NCAA knows better than the entire rest of the world how the game should work.  Phthphth.

Second game: Tennessee vs. Nebraska.  This was a home game for the Cornhuskers, who packed the stadium with a second-highest-all-time attendance of 2100 fans.  That’s like one of every 100 residents… whereas Portland gets one of every 25 residents at a Thorns game to make attendance figures more than 10 times larger.  (For comparison, Nebraska gridiron football gets something like one of every three residents to show up.  Football isn’t religion in Nebraska - it’s much more important than that.)

Perhaps because it was an NCAA tournament game, the stadium made a pretense of neutrality, playing the Tennessee fight song as the Volunteers entered.  It was fun to hear their entire team point in the air and “woooo” audibly - It’s good, old, Rocky Top (woooo!).  

Thing is, even though Nebraska was the highest of the four seeds, this game seemed of less quality than the first.  Both teams played helter-skelter, causing the wannabe-coach middle-aged men in the crowd to holler “settle!” with increasing intensity, becoming audibly angry when the players didn’t obey.  On occasions when the teams did settle possession in the midfield, neither could complete a pass to the forwards.  Seemingly every pass was too heavy, intercepted, out of touch, or simply astray.  

Seconds before the half, Tennessee keeper Ally Zazzara slipped as she took a goal kick.  Oy.  The ball ran straight to Nebraska’s Sarah Weber, who punished the mistake that wasn’t even Zazzara’s fault.  Of course the crowd cheered, and they should!  No one taunted or laughed at the keeper’s misfortune.  But as a quasi-neutral, I cringed.  Cheering felt dirty.  The poor woman slipped!  The Tennessee team avoided their keeper, who was the last one into the locker room accompanied only by her (presumably) goalkeeper coach.  This surprised me - I thought the team would surround Zazzara, try to boost her confidence for the second half to come.  They did not.

And then the Tennessee players didn’t woooo when they returned after the half down 1-0. Rocky Top without the “woooo” sounds uncannily incomplete, like “shave and a haircut” without “two bits.”  I thought the team were finished.  Yet UT equalized moments into the second half.  

The game became tense, but never really picked up in quality.  Passes didn’t connect; fouls stopped attacking action.  

I was initially rooting for Nebraska.  I’d spent many weeks of my life in Lincoln; I own a hat shaped like an enormous ear of corn.  I wanted to celebrate with a crown of supporters.  The problem is, too many of these supporters were sorta toxic and probably inebriated middle-aged men.  

I mean, I understand and accept that when a call goes against the home team, the fans will howl.  When two players collided in the box after a Nebraska forward headed over the bar, the crowd ignorantly brayed for a penalty.  That’s part of tribalism.  When two players tussled at midfield and both went down, the crowd screamed bloody murder when the foul went Tennessee’s way.  These aren’t the fan reactions that bothered me; in fact, I’d probably be disappointed if the fans were not invested enough to howl at these incidents. 

As the game mounted in intensity, though, the drunk men turned their wrath toward the referee.  “Whaddaya mean that ball was out?  Are you blind?  What game are you watching?”  Every minor decision brought forth more whining, more intense personal attacks on the ref. Not after 50-50 foul calls, but offside decisions, which way the throw-in went, niggling complaints.  

I’ve had a number of conversations with colleagues about the boundary between legitimate tribalism and over-the-top abuse of opponents/referees.  I’m a referee myself; but I willingly accept the home team howling as an important part of the game.  I’m a commentator for my school’s sports teams, where I am always utterly respectful of the opponent; yet I also am supportive of student banter about who is gonna win, or about who won last year, etc.  Separating the in-game passion from the post-game handshake is, to me, a critical part of learning to function in a society in which many of us are often on different “teams”.  I still don’t exactly know where that line sits.  Yet I do know that these obnoxious Husker fans crossed it.

I finally snapped when the arsehole to my left screamed at the referee with five minutes left.  The ref stopped play and indicated a head injury - he asked the Nebraska athletic trainer to take a player off for treatment who seemed to show symptoms of a concussion.  This dude - and a few of his like-minded fans around him - went berserk.  “Let them play!”  “She’s fine!” “The game’s not about you!”  “Go back to the YMCA, butthead!”  “You’ve been a butthead all game!”  And the personal abuse toward the referee got progressively worse.  No one shut these folks up.

This is the bystander problem that we try to address with the 14 year olds in my care.  If you say nothing, you’re complicit.  “Well, he might have been out of line, but *I* didn’t do anything wrong, so I can’t be blamed for anything that happened” is simply unacceptable.  Did you speak up?  Did you leave the area?  Or did you just grin and grab the popcorn while someone, even someone in absentia, was abused?  

I wish one of this man’s relatives or friends had spoken up.  “Hey, that’s going too far” coming from a family member can do wonders.  Or “come on, man, cheer for our team and shut up about the ref” from a fellow Cornhusker - preferably one who’s been leading the “HUSKER! POWER!” chants all night - would have helped.  

I was in no position to say anything.  I had no prior relationship with the nasty man; I was not in any way part of Husker Nation.  I was just a weird guy with an elephant on my head.  So I moved to a different seat to watch the last few minutes.  

And oh, what a last few minutes.  The game looked to be heading to extra time.  But with less than a minute to play, defender Ella Guyott - who had earlier in the game repositioned as a forward due to a substitution - stayed calm at the far post when a cross went over everyone else’s heads.  She slotted the ball into the net with a finish that looked so-easy-anyone-could-do-it but I would likely miss 9 of 10 times.  And that was that.  Nebraska 2, Tennessee 1.  

The players took a victory lap around the stadium, giving the front row high fives - that right there is so much of what I love about women’s soccer.  The players show overt, enthusiastic thanks for their fans’ support.  The teams huddled together, in wondrous shock and catatonic shock, respectively.  And the crowd raced to their cars to beat the awful traffic surrounding the stadium.  Glad I could walk.

I planned to spend the next morning walking around town, finding a cafe in which to grade my trimester exams.  Unfortunately, I had chosen the hotel in a rundown strip mall next to the “MEAT & BEER”.*  No coffee, unless you count McDonalds.  

*At night, the lights for the ampersand and T didn’t work, so the store became MEA BEER.

I did eat at the strip mall’s Runza, that wonderful fast-food empire that only exists within 600 miles of Lincoln.  They serve fast-food meat pies that are part calzone, part Hamburger-Helper-in-a-bread-wrap.  I was first exposed to Runza in 2000, when the AP physics readers were served Runzas for lunch.  Runza Rex, their tyrannosaurus mascot, handed me a Runza baseball cap which I still own.  I ate three of these large sandwiches.  After which I fell asleep during the afternoon grading session - the only time I’ve ever fallen asleep at the reading.  (Since that day, I’ve not eaten any lunch at all during the AP reading.)

Eventually, a twenty minute walk brought me to an excellent coffee shop in the UNL “Innovation campus”.  No clue what they’re innovating, or whether they’re gonna rename the rest of the university the “stuck in the past campus.”  Guh.  But the coffee was good, the barista was friendly, the tables were spacious and clean with lots of windows.  Exams got graded.