Updated – Sept. 5, 2006

The Notre Dame women’s soccer team (4-0-0) – coming off victories over 19th-ranked USC (2-0) and a Santa Clara team that was ranked as high as No. 1 in the nation (3-1) – has risen to the top spot in three of the four national polls. Most notably, the Irish now are No. 1 in the National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) poll, which had Notre Dame No. 5 in its preseason poll but did not update its poll after the first week of the season.

Notre Dame also remains No. 1 in the Soccer Times poll (which surveys 16 of the nation’s top coaches) and has moved up to No. 1 in the rankings compiled by the Soccer Buzz women’s soccer website. Soccer America magazine still has Florida State (3-0-0) in the top spot but moved Notre Dame up from third to second.

Notre Dame, Florida State and West Virginia (4-0-0) are the only teams from the NSCAA preseason top 25 that have yet to suffer at least one loss or tie in the young 2006 season.

Notre Dame – which has opened the season by outscoring four teams that competed in the 2005 NCAAs by a combined score of 16-2 – now has been ranked No. 1 in the NSCAA poll during four seasons of the current decade and in seven of the past 13 seasons: 1994, ’95, ’96, 2000, ’04, ’05 and ’06. The Irish are the only team to be ranked No. 1 by the NSCAA in each of the past three seasons.

This marks the second-earliest No. 1 ranking for Notre Dame in the NSCAA poll, trailing only the 2005 team that owned the top ranking in the preseason. The Irish own a 51-5-2 all-time record when playing as the No. 1 team in the NSCAA poll, including 35-2-2 in the regular season.

Notre Dame first entered the top spot in the national coaches poll (then called the ISAA poll) for the final month of the 1994 season and then was No. 1 in the final ISAA poll for the 1995 season, after winning the NCAA title game. The Irish spent the final two months of the 1996 season as the top-ranked team in the NSCAA poll and then returned to the No. 1 spot for the final 11 weeks in 2000. Notre Dame’s 2004 team held the NSCAA top ranking for six weeks in the middle of that season and last year’s Irish squad the opened that season as the No. 1 team for the first three weeks of the 2005 season.

The Soccer Times poll is led by Notre Dame with 397 total voting points and 14 of the 16 first-place votes while Florida State is second (377; 2 first-place votes).

Here are links to the most updated versions of all four rankings:

http://www.nscaa.com/seniorRes.php?it=129

http://www.soccertimes.com/ncaa/top25/women.htm

http://www.socceramerica.com/article.asp?Art_ID=562137580

http://www.soccerbuzz.com/2006rankings/rankings090406.htm

Several teams from Notre Dame’s schedule remain among this week’s rankings, led by: Santa Clara (#3 SA, #4 NSCAA and ST, and SB), Virginia (#9 SB, #10 NSCAA, #12 ST, #15 SA), Connecticut (#9 ST, #11 NSCAA and SB, #12 SA) and West Virginia (#9 SA, #10 SB, #11 ST, #17 NSCAA) and USC (#17 ST, #22 SB). Rutgers was listed 29th in the expanded top-30 Soccer Buzz rankings and received votes in the NSCAA poll (not among the top-25) – while the Soccer Times poll includes votes for Villanova and Michigan. Marquette, a BIG EAST team that will not face the Irish during the 2006 regular season, is 17th per SA and SB, 23rd in the NSCAA rankings and 25th in the Soccer Times poll.

The Irish are in quest of the program’s third national title and second in the past three years, with North Carolina being the only Division I women’s soccer program that has won more than two NCAA titles. The team’s 17 returning letterwinners include eight who were starters during the 2005 season.

Notre Dame lost four key regulars – All-Americans Katie Thorlakson (forward) and Candace Chapman (right back), along with the Academic All-America duo of goalkeeper Erika Bohn and midfielder Annie Schefter – from the 2005 team that went 22-3-0, led the nation in scoring (4.40 goals per game) and allowed just 54 shots on goal all season. Top returners include two other All-Americans, senior midfielder Jen Buczkowski and sophomore forward Kerri Hanks, who both were among the final-15 candidates for the 2005 Hermann M.A.C. Trophy.

Six others have returned who have received all-BIG EAST honors, among them: versatile senior defender Christie Shaner, senior midfielder Jill Krivacek, junior forward Amanda Cinalli, sophomore midfielder Brittany Bock, sophomore central defender Carrie Dew and senior utility player Lizzie Reed. The only returning starter who has yet to be honored by the BIG EAST is the highly underrated Kim Lorenzen, a senior center back who will serve as the team’s solo captain in 2006.

Top candidates to fill the open starting spots have included three juniors: forward Susan Pinnick, outside back Ashley Jones and goalkeeper Lauren Karas.

Five freshmen figure to play key roles in the 2006 season, with that group including longtime teammates Michele Weissenhofer (forward) and Amanda Clark (defender/midfielder), battle-tested midfielder Courtney Rosen and versatile defender Haley Ford and goalkeeper Kelsey Lysander.

Hanks and Buczkowski again were among the 25 players named to the Hermann Trophy watch list for the 2006 season, with Hanks also collecting various preseason All-America honors (plus BIG EAST preseason offensive player of the year). Those players were joined by Shaner (the league’s preseason defensive player of the year), Cinalli and Bock in comprising five of the 11 players who were named to the 2006 preseason all-BIG EAST team.

The Irish entered the 2006 season fielding a roster that has tightened up a bit on its geographical reach. The team now includes six players from Texas (most notably Hanks, Ford and Karas) while six all hail from the Chicago area: the senior trio of Buczkowski, Krivacek and Lorenzen, plus the former Neuqua Valley High School teammates Bock, Clark and Weissenhofer. The roster also includes three players from southern California – Jones, Dew and Lysander – who all could find themselves in the starting lineup.

The eight-member senior class has set a leadership tone since their arrival early in the fall of 2003, combining to log 460 career games played while helping the Irish win 90 percent of their games (71-7-2) during the past four seasons. As they look down upon the current freshman class, there could be a parallel to the 2003 season when four of the current seniors (Buczkowski, Krivacek, Lorenzen and Shaner) served as regulars on that talented team.

Head coach Randy Waldrum traditionally has recruited versatile players and has not been hesitant to utilize position shifts and altered formations in order to maximize the roster’s personnel.

Notre Dame’s 2006 squad boasts three (Buczkowski, Cinalli and Hanks) who have played with the U.S. Under-21 National Team, two others – Bock and Dew – who have reported a couple weeks late after wrapping up play with Team USA at the Under-20 World Championship, and two more (Pinnick and Rosen) who are products of the Under-17 National Team.

The Irish also headed into 2006 looking to maintain an academic tradition within the program that just keeps getting better and better, with the team’s 3.42 GPA in the 2006 semester representing the best among Notre Dame’s 26 varsity programs. Several players will be top candidates for Academic All-America honors, led by Jones and her 3.96 cumulative GPA as an accounting major (her 19 classes so far have produced 17 A grades and a pair of A-minuses).

Notre Dame took several noteworthy streaks into the 2006 season, currently having scored in 40 straight games (second-longest in the program’s history) while going ubeaten (30-0-1) in 31 straight games at Alumni Field – the longest home unbeaten streak in the program’s history -and also going unbeaten at home versus BIG EAST teams in 66 straight (65-0-1, since 1995). The Irish have not lost in 19 consecutive overtime games (14-0-5, since ’99) while the seniors have yet to play a game in which the Irish were outshot, a span of 80 games.