USL Feature
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
By NICHOLAS MURRAY
It’s been a remarkable 12-month journey for Florida State’s Tiffany McCarty.
This time last year, the junior was sitting out with a medical red-shirt after a tumor was found in her jaw, requiring surgery that ended her 2010 season for the Seminoles prematurely, watching her teammates fall 5-0 in Palo Alto, Calif. to Stanford.
On Friday night, she’ll be leading the Seminoles into the College Cup semifinals in Atlanta against Stanford, and hoping to help FSU win its first national championship.
“It’s really exciting,” McCarty said by phone this week. “We won our first ACC [Tournament] as well this year, so we’re really excited to represent our school and get back to the national championship game, and hopefully compete for a national championship. It’s kind of hard to put into words, it’s just a great opportunity to showcase our talents.”
McCarty has long been a standout for the Seminoles. The ACC Freshman of the Year in 2008 and Offensive Player of the Year in 2009, McCarty was named to the Hermann award watch list for 2010. But just before she was set to head for the U20 World Cup in Germany, she was diagnosed with a rare tumor in her jaw. The good news for McCarty was that it wasn’t cancerous. The bad news was that she would need surgery, ruling her out of the competition.
“I actually had to have two surgeries,” McCarty said. “The first one I had to have it removed, and I was out for a month recovering, then I came back to school and did my school work, and then that spring I had to get hip surgery to replace the bone they took out [of her jaw], and that took maybe about two months for me to fully recover from that.”
McCarty continued to try to stay in shape, although when she first got back to joining her FSU teammates for their training runs the pace was pretty slow. Gradually her hips, from which bone had been shaved off to form a graft for her jaw, recovered and she was able to start moving with her regular fluidity.
There still remained the question of getting back into game-shape for the Seminoles, though. For that, McCarty and FSU coach Mark Krikorian agreed the best move would be to head west and play in the USL W-League with the Pali Blues.
“Yeah, I wanted to get a lot of soccer in, considering I hadn’t played in a year, I think it was important to play games,” McCarty said. “I talked it over with my coach and he thought it was a good idea for me to go down there, he knew it was a good training environment there, and I had a good time.”
And the Blues were glad to have her. While they just missed out on the playoffs, McCarty had a solid season, leading the team with five goals in 14 games and getting to reconnect with a number of teammates from her youth national team days.
She’ll get to reconnect with a few of those same players this weekend, only this time they’ll be part of the opposition. Stanford’s Rachel Quon, Camille Levin and Mariah Nogueira were also part of the Blues’ squad this summer, and after finishing as runner-up the past two seasons in the NCAA Tournament will pose a tough test for McCarty and the Seminoles.
“We’re all really competitive,” McCarty said. “I think we’ll save the high-fives and handshakes for after the game, but I’ve known a lot of them since I was 14 and 15, playing with the national team, so we go way back from stuff like that, but it’s going to be a really good game.”
If someone is going to spoil the Cardinal’s undefeated season, though, it may be McCarty. Tied for eighth in the nation with 18 goals, and with another six assists on top of that, McCarty provides the firepower for an FSU side that has won 10 consecutive games entering Friday’s semifinal.
According to McCarty, though, the reason for FSU’s success has been a total team effort. After a poor spell of results in the middle of the season, capped by a 3-0 defeat at home to Maryland, the Seminoles took stock of where they stood, and what then needed to do to turn things around.
“I think we kind of had to take a step back and realize we had to do it together, that we’re all in this together,” McCarty said. “Some of our performances really weren’t good enough. I think since then we’ve all taken personal responsibility for our own performances, and all of us have taken the steps necessary for us to win. I think all of us know it’s going to take everyone playing at their best for us to win.”
If they can continue their run of form and claim the championship, though, it would cap a remarkable season, and comeback, for McCarty.
“As of right now, it would be one of the greatest accomplishments of my career,” she said. “It would be the greatest feeling in the world.”