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By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE –– For University of Virginia men’s soccer coach George Gelnovatch, the offseason is often a time of uncertainty. Not until his players report for preseason practice each August can Gelnovatch be exactly sure what his roster will look like in the fall.
“It’s a tricky thing,” he said.
That’s because players with eligibility remaining in NCAA men’s soccer regularly turn pro in the offseason. In January, for example, Aboubacar Keita signed a homegrown contract with Major League Soccer’s Columbus Crew.
Keita, who would have been a sophomore at UVA this fall, ended up representing the United States this spring at the FIFA Under-20 World Cup in Poland.
Joe Bell, another UVA standout as a sophomore last season, also played in that tournament. Bell, a midfielder, captained New Zealand and helped his country advance to the round of 16. His performance in Poland piqued the interest of several professional clubs, including Viking FK in Norway.
After the U20 World Cup, Bell traveled to Norway and trained with Viking FK, which is based in Stavanger. The club offered him a contract that Bell turned down.
“Obviously, coming to UVA, the hope was to go pro,” Bell said, “but the most important thing is timing, and you have to look at the long term. So I sat down with my family and the people closest to me, and we thought about it for a long time, and we felt at this moment the best thing for my future is to be back here at UVA and play out this season and then see what happens.”
Viking FK persisted. Late last month, the club offered Bell a more lucrative deal that, he admits, he found tempting.
“That made me re-think and re-evaluate the decision, but I stuck with the same choice,” Bell said, and for that the Cavaliers are grateful.
On a UVA team that advanced to the NCAA tournament’s round of 16 last season, seven players totaled at least four points. Six of them are back –– Nathaniel Crofts (14), Daryl Dike (11), Cabrel Happi Kamseu (11), Bell (7), Daniel Steedman (4) and Irakoze Donasiyano (4) –– along with three other starters, including goalkeeper Colin Shutler.
“We were the youngest team in the Sweet Sixteen, by far,” said Gelnovatch, who’s in his 24th year as head coach at his alma mater.
Dike traveled to Germany this summer, Gelnovatch said, and trained for about a week with Werder Bremen, a club that competes in the prestigious Bundesliga, and he appears poised for a big sophomore season at UVA.
The 6-2 Dike has dropped about 12 pounds since the end of last season. He’s down to 217 and “looks great,” Gelnovatch said.
Virginia, ranked No. 12 in the United Soccer Coaches preseason poll, begins practice Wednesday. The first of the Wahoos’ three exhibitions is Saturday night at Klöckner Stadium, against Siena.
UVA opens the season Aug. 30 against Pacific at Klöckner. Three nights later, on Sept. 2, Virginia meets reigning NCAA champion Maryland at D.C. United’s Audi Field in Washington.
Gelnovatch, who has guided the Cavaliers to two NCAA titles (2009 and 2014), said it’s been years since his program entered a season with so many proven players. Promising newcomers include freshmen Jeremy Verley, Andreas Ueland and Axel Gunnarsson, and the Cavaliers’ potential is one of the reasons Bell decided to come back for his junior season.
He returned to Charlottesville last month for the final session of summer school.
“I think we have something really good going here,” said Bell, who lives with center back Henry Kessler, another returning starter. “Obviously, you don’t want to jinx the season, but with the amount of people that came back and what we saw in the spring earlier this year, it’s really exciting.”
A psychology major who’s on track to graduate in December 2020 –– he enrolled at UVA in January 2017 –– Bell is from Wanaka, a town of about 8,500 on New Zealand’s South Island. He started every game for the Cavaliers in 2017 and was named to the ACC’s All-Freshman team. As a sophomore, he was a third-team All-ACC selection.
Early in his UVA career, Bell would occasionally find himself out wide, where he’s less effective, and he’s also been used in an attacking role, which doesn’t play to his strengths.
“It took me some time to figure out where and how to play Joe,” Gelnovatch said. “This past spring, I think we nailed it.”
Bell operates best in the middle of the field, “and it’s very phase-oriented,” Gelnovatch said. “What I’m trying to prevent is big transitions against us. It’s the same thing as in basketball. We’re trying to bottle teams up all the time when we lose the ball, and I’m trying to manufacture attacking transitions. If we can build in our half of the field as they’re trying to press us, now we can manufacture getting behind them and trying to score.
“And that’s what Joe’s best at. He’s like that point guard who’s not overly athletic but can handle the ball, doesn’t panic when someone’s pressing him, can get you out in a pass or two, and all of the sudden you’re behind [the opponent].”
Bell, who was born in England, moved to New Zealand with his family when he was three years old. His dual citizenship expands his options for a professional career.
“If I want to go pro in Europe after college,” Bell said, “then having an English passport means I’m a European, so I won’t count as an international player if they want to sign me, which is really beneficial.”
Bell also played for New Zealand at the U20 World Cup in 2017, but his profile on that team was much lower than it was this year.
After reaching the round of 16 in 2017, New Zealand went into this year’s tournament looking to advance to the quarterfinals, which would have been a first for the country. The Kiwis fell short of that goal, but this time “we dominated some of the games and we actually competed at a high level with the teams,” Bell said.
In pool play, New Zealand won 5-0 over Honduras and 2-0 over Norway before losing 2-0 to Uruguay. In the round of 16, New Zealand fell to Colombia on penalty kicks.
“Colombia is obviously a great side, and that game could have gone either way,” Bell said. “So it was a good achievement for us as a team. I think the best thing was, the people [back in New Zealand] watching us play were impressed with how we were playing and how we were competing. So the experience was definitely different from the previous World Cup. The previous World Cup I was quite young, and I was just hoping to get minutes on the pitch. This World Cup, it was a bit more about influencing the game and dominating the pitch.
“It was a really good experience, and it was good to hear that back from the people in New Zealand, how much they enjoyed watching us. That meant a lot to us.”
Training with Viking FK in Norway helped Bell learn “what the standard is like and how good you have to be to play at that level,” he said. “Obviously, the [U20] World Cup is a good chance to compare yourself to international players, but [Viking FK] was a more direct comparison, and I think it went well.”
For the second straight year, Bell and fullback Robin Afamefuna will be the Cavaliers’ captains, and they led the team’s workouts this summer.
“They’re all in,” Gelnovatch said. “Both of them have really embraced the team [culture]. Robin is as fit as he’s ever looked, and he’s super motivated, not only because this is his senior year, but because he knows this is a team that has a real chance. That seems to be a real motivation for the whole team this summer.”
His players have shown what Gelnovatch calls a “professional mindset.”
That doesn’t mean “everybody wants to be a professional or is going to be a pro,” he explained, but they show “professionalism in their training habits, in how they interact with each other, in their fitness, in their nutrition. I’m most excited about that aspect of it. These guys carry themselves and take care of themselves really, really well.”