Seattle Pacific seeks elusive title

Meredith Teague's position on the Seattle Pacific women's soccer team is midfielder.

Her actual role, SPU coach Chuck Sekyra says, merits a loftier term: impact player.

"She's very quiet and unassuming away from the field," said Sekyra, in his sixth year as coach at Seattle Pacific. "But she's grown into a superstar on the field."

Teague — a Redmond native, Bellevue Christian grad and the 2008 player of the year in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference — will again be counted on as a difference-maker as the fourth-ranked Falcons on Thursday make their third Final Four appearance (NCAA Division II) in four seasons.

SPU (20-1-2) travels to Tampa, Fla., to face seventh-ranked Metro State of Denver (20-1-3) in a 1 p.m. Pacific Time semifinal. The winner advances to Saturday's championship match against No. 21 Saint Rose of Albany, N.Y., (20-3-2) or No. 2 West Florida (23-0-1).

Teague is part of a talented four-player senior unit that joined the Falcons as freshmen in 2005 and, as Sekyra sees it, transformed a still-fledgling program established in 2001 into a perennial D-II title contender.

Teague, fellow midfielder Shannon Oakes (Boise) and defenders Katie Taylor (Columbia River) and Claire Grubbs (Sterling, Va.), all became starters as freshmen and carried SPU into the 2005 championship match, which the Falcons lost in overtime.

Last year the foursome helped SPU win 23 consecutive matches before being upset in a semifinal of the Final Four.

This year the Falcons have gone unbeaten in their past 15 matches while outscoring opponents 48-5. Other than one loss on Sept. 20, SPU has trailed for just eight seconds all season.

"Winning it all this year would be a nice storybook finish for them," Sekyra said. "I'd love to see them all smiling at each other at the end."

All four, he said, are hardworking, high-character team role models, all honored for their skills. Grubbs was a 2007 D-II All-American; Oakes has been named all-GNAC the past three years; Taylor was a second-team pick this season.

Yet Teague, the 2008 Division II West Region player of the year, has been clutch like no other.

Sekyra set this scene: 2005 national semifinal; SPU trails early vs. a heavily favored Carson Newman squad with 11 returning starters; yet Teague drills a shot that reverses the momentum.

"She just crushed that ball," Sekyra recalled. " ... From that point it became a one-sided game in our favor. She got us going."

As a senior, Teague has routinely performed similar magic. In SPU's 20 wins, she has booted the winning goal seven times and delivered the winning assist six times.

Flashback to Nov. 20, a third-round tournament match against 12th-ranked Western Washington — the team that handed SPU its only loss and one of its ties this season. It was Teague who broke a scoreless tie in the second overtime (105th minute) with a pinpoint 20-yard blast to the upper corner.

"I don't know if we'll ever have another player who can hit the ball as hard as she does," Sekyra said. "When it comes off her foot, it's going fast and it bends. It's hard to deal with."

Sekyra cautioned a reporter that Teague is no fan of the limelight. "She's incredibly unselfish," he said. "She always wants to give somebody else credit for a great pass, or she'll say she made a lucky shot. She's very humble. She doesn't want people to think that she's all that, but she is."

Sekyra's prediction proved true.

"I'm not very good at interviews," Teague conceded with a small laugh. "I just like to play the game. I love the creative aspect of scoring goals, all the passing and moving and dribbling. But it's really the players around me who make plays happen. They're the ones who make goals possible."

Teague described the goal against Western Washington:

"I just hit the ball, looked up, saw Shannon smiling at me, then all of a sudden I was under this huge dogpile," she said. "Usually we just give each other a hug after a goal."

Teague, who followed sisters Allison and Melinda to SPU (Meredith and Allison were teammates in 2005), shares a house with eight women, including Oakes and Taylor, and is majoring in visual communication.

She hopes to land an internship as a graphic artist in the months ahead, preferably not long after she and her senior teammates finally get to claim a national title.

"To finish on such a high note, nothing could be better," she said. "We all want to give each other that gift."