Aug. 18, 2009

Contact: Martin Rickman

When Mitch Boyer entered Cleveland State, he joined a team that had not won a game in 2005 and was winless in league play for the last two seasons. Fast forward to last season, where the team finished 9-8-3 and reached the Horizon League Championship for the first time since 2002.

In his senior season, Boyer is ready to finish the transformation that started when he first became a Viking, and seems confident in leading Cleveland State to a season to remember.

Boyer, who played his high school ball in Parma at Normandy High School, almost chose not to play soccer in college at all. He was considering playing football as a kicker at the Division I level, with interest from schools like Miami (OH). He made the difficult choice between soccer and football when family friend T.J. Kolba left his alma mater at John Carroll to join head coach Ali Kazemaini at Cleveland State. Kolba played with Boyer's brother Dallas, a coach on the Vikings women's soccer team, when they were younger.

"My brother played with T.J. growing up and our parents have been best friends ever since they were young," Boyer said. "I've always been around him and he's been my mentor the last four years. I wasn't even going to play college soccer until my senior year of high school; I was going to play football and I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for T.J."

Boyer saw an opportunity at Cleveland State to restart a program under first-year head coach Kazemaini, who had previously spent 14 years at John Carroll. During his time at JCU, Kazemaini compiled a 176-76-13 record with seven Ohio Athletic Conference Championships and four trips to the NCAA Tournament.

Kazemaini, a four year letterman at CSU who was a second team All-American in both his sophomore and senior seasons, was tasked with restarting Cleveland State. He did so by focusing his recruiting efforts on local players like Boyer. Kazemaini admitted that keeping the young players' spirits up was difficult.

"Any time you bring a freshman into an established program they have someone to look up to," Kazemaini said, "but here you bring people and sell them this vision and there is no one to look up to--so you are it."

"You have to be a leader and be the one that endures all the obstacles that you are going to face and that is a lot to ask. The toughest job for us was to psychologically keep players from losing confidence. We've done a decent job with the players as far as their mind is concerned and the players have done a great job of seeing the long term vision."

Asked to contribute right away, Boyer was the only player on the roster to play every minute of the season. Cleveland State improved right away, though, as they finished the 2006 season with a 6-10-2 record, more wins than the previous two years combined.

After a rough 2007 season that saw the Vikings lose seven matches by a single goal, Boyer really started become a leader. He shared the team lead in goals with five in the 2008 season and helped the team to a winning record for the first time since 1993.

"Boyer has developed into a leader," Kazemaini said. "He has qualities, but he had to mature into that role. He was a freshman himself, so to come into a new situation and play Division I and play some of the top teams in the country and you have no one to look up to--that's a lot to take."

"The biggest component was keeping their minds in tact so that they can believe in themselves to turn into leaders. Mitch has come into his own by enduring the first two years and getting some success and recognition last year. Not only is he more comfortable, but he has learned to work now with the new group that has come in to let them know what our style and system is."

Kazemaini's first recruiting class, including Boyer, are all entering their senior seasons with one thing on their mind: a Horizon League Championship. They will be tested early in the UC Irvine Invitational in Irvine, Ca., playing both Santa Clara and UC Irvine. UC Irvine was 15-2-6 last season and made it to the Sweet Sixteen in the NCAA Tournament. The Vikings lost a heartbreaker to Irvine, 2-1, last year after the Anteaters broke a 1-1 tie in the 85th minute.

"UC Irvine being ranked in the top-10 and being one of our first games of the season will be a good test to see where we are at," Boyer said, "and I believe more than anybody on the team that we should have no problem competing and possibly winning that game."

That confidence is representative of how mature Boyer, and the rest of the seniors, have become. After the trials and tribulations of their first two years, and falling just short of the Horizon Championship last season, they are ready to take that next step.

That all comes back to the vision that Kazemaini instilled in his players when he first started at Cleveland State. It was a vision of bringing back pride in donning the Viking jersey and restoring the rich tradition of a program that had 23 winning seasons between 1965 and 1990.

"Our senior class is the class that Kaz brought in hoping that this was the team that could do it," Boyer said. "Now we finally have gone through the three years we needed to get under our belt to see how Division I is played; we know that now and we have the same group of guys to do it again. We were so close last year that we finally realize what it's going to take."