Syracuse hasn’t won an ACC game in over 1,000 days. Is this the year?
It’s been 1,082 days since Syracuse beat Miami 3-1 for just its third ACC win in three years. This year could be different for the Orange. Lars Jendruschewitz | Senior Staff Photographer
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Ahead of its first Atlantic Coast Conference match against SMU on Thursday, Syracuse has just one loss, has scored 17 goals and has kept a clean sheet in five of its eight games.
That propels SU to a strong rest of the season, right? Think again.
It’s been over two years since Chelsea Domond’s goal and two assists guided the Orange to a 3-1 victory over Miami. A year before, Jenna Tivnan’s header broke a 10-game losing streak. In 2019, Meghan Root’s late heroics against Wake Forest snapped a nearly two-year ACC win drought.
Those are Nicky Thrasher Adams’ only conference wins as head coach of the Orange.
In three of the previous four seasons, Syracuse has entered conference play with a winning record. But whether it was an 8-0 pummeling against Clemson, slim 1-0 losses to Duke and North Carolina, or a fourth straight defeat versus then-No. 2 Florida State, the Orange can’t get over the hump in conference play. They’re the only ACC school with fewer than five conference victories since 2019. Their last ACC win was on Sept. 25, 2022.
“If you’re not on that team, you’ll never understand what happened. It felt like everything was going wrong,” former Syracuse attacker Erin Flurey said.
Even with Syracuse’s bright start to 2025, the question is whether its glass is half-full or half-empty. Here’s why SU has faltered against ACC opponents in the past and how the Orange can end their drought in 2025:
Top opponents
The ACC is the best women’s soccer conference in the NCAA. It’s where four of the last six national champions and five of the previous six runners-up reside.
In the Week 4 United Soccer Coaches Women’s Rankings, Duke, Stanford, Virginia, Notre Dame and Florida State were all in the top 10, while reigning national champion UNC is slotted in at No. 19. Syracuse will play all but the Fighting Irish in 2025.
It’s always been the same tale.
Since beating Miami in 2022, SU has played 11 matches against ranked opponents, recording a 0-2-9 record. In those matches, the Orange found the back of the net 10 times compared to their opponents’ 38.
“We competed, literally every week, with someone who’s in the Top 25,” former Syracuse defender Liesel Odden said.
You’d have to go back 24 years to find the last time SU beat a ranked opponent. Syracuse, then a member of the Big East Conference, defeated No. 24 Illinois 1-0 in the first round of the 2001 NCAA Tournament. No current Syracuse players were born yet. Adams was a senior on Texas A&M’s women’s soccer team.
On the flip side, the Orange have never been ranked in the top 25. The last two ACC preseason polls have put Syracuse last in the conference. It’ll be hard to overcome those trends in 2025.
In the prestigious Atlantic Coast Conference, Syracuse often is faced with top opponents. The Orange haven’t beat a top-25 team in 24 years. Isaac Williams | Contributing Photographer
Not able to finish matches
Sometimes in soccer, goals don’t tell the whole story. A team can sit back, defend astutely and then nick a result. Possession has often been referred to as the “most dangerous statistic in football.”
Simply put, an excellent performance doesn’t always muster an excellent result.
“I don’t want to speak down on the program at all because I love it, but something we lacked was our composure to finish,” Flurey said. “I think we fought in every single game. We brought the blue collar. The past two years we lost to the national champions by one goal.”
Goalkeeper Shea Vanderbosch has been a key player for Syracuse ever since she entered at halftime with Syracuse down 5-0 against UConn in 2022. Nearly three years later, she ranks third in career saves (318) and is set to break Everton and Ireland international Courtney Brosnan’s record (344).
During a mid-September fixture against undefeated and eventual national champion No. 3 Florida State in 2023, Vanderbosch positioned the Orange to pull off a major upset. Seven saves in the first half helped them to a 2-1 lead at halftime. An own goal pulled the Seminoles back, and Vanderbosch did all she could to keep SU level with 16 saves — one short of Syracuse’s program record.
But former Seminole and current Paris Saint-Germain midfielder Jennifer Echegini’s late curler gave FSU a 3-2 win.
A year later, Syracuse was in the same predicament. SU held UNC scoreless until Bella Sember’s penalty broke the deadlock in the 66th minute for North Carolina’s 10th straight win over the Orange.
Lack of goalscoring
Goals win you games. In the 27 ACC matches since its last win, Syracuse has only scored 17 goals.
It hasn’t netted more than two goals in a conference match since its triumph over the Hurricanes, with Flurey and Ashley Rauch being the only Syracuse players to record more than one goal versus ACC opponents in 2023 and 2024.
Those numbers aren’t enough to knock off teams in the bottom half of the conference, and nowhere near enough to challenge the ACC’s best.
So far in 2025, SU’s exploded for multi-goal games against Charleston Southern, Canisius, Holy Cross and Cornell. But it also struggled to score against Quinnipiac, Princeton and Binghamton.
The inconsistent goal-scoring levels will cause problems.
“I don’t think we really stuck to our identity tonight. Defended pretty well, but then we kept giving the ball away, and we didn’t have the defending to attack mentality that we’ve been so good at,” Adams said after the 0-0 draw with Binghamton.
Why this year could be different
If the glass is half-full for Syracuse, then it has everything it needs to shoot up the ACC standings.
It has Mia Klammer, who leads the team with five goals. Rauch has seven goal contributions in eight games. The defense, anchored by freshman Bree Bridges, has only conceded four scores in eight games.
Most importantly, Adams’ new 3-5-2 formation blends attacking potency and defensive stability.
“When our wingers come back, I think that’s when we’re the strongest because we have five back there and our sixes,” Bridges said. “It’s a really good defensive, compact shape. I think it’s smart. … Against ACC (teams), that shape that we have will be very helpful to slow them down.”
Syracuse has been in this predicament before. This barren run has spanned two seasons. So, against an SMU team that finished 13th in the ACC last year, who says the Orange can’t grab their first ACC victory in over 1,000 days and push forward from there?
“We don’t harp on the season before,” former SU defender Kylen Grant said on how SU approached conference play in the past. “We go into the mindset of we understand, especially going into the ACC, we’re the underdog. But it creates that mindset that we have nothing to lose, so we’re going to put everything we have out there.”
