Victories, Moral and Otherwise: 30 Years of East Carolina Women’s Soccer

"100%. Absolutely, no doubt in my mind."

Eileen Moore is confident in her answer, still steadfast after over thirty years. She's speaking from England, where she now resides, and she's just been asked whether she thought, back when the East Carolina women's soccer team, previously a club sport, was elevated to a varsity side, that the program would be where it is today.

A program which has since then, won over 250 games, received votes in the top 25, defeated four ranked teams and won six games over programs which have won NCAA Championships.

It was 1993 then—December 7, 1993, when the East Carolina athletics administration announced the addition of women's soccer as a varsity sport.

Over the course of three decades, memories may fuzz, records may be lost, and the distance between key characters may fade; but what remains is an unambiguous fact: East Carolina Soccer is stronger today than it was when the program was founded thirty years ago.

Women's soccer, as a sport in 1994, was an institution on the brink—in the most positive idealization of the word. That year, 131 schools sponsored NCAA Division I women's soccer programs, up from 75 in 1990. By 2023, 337 schools had a varsity program. That works out to north of 10,000 players in Division I alone. Players who, prior to 1982, had no possibility of any such opportunity.

There's another thing folks you talk to from that era remember. That, if not for the work of Moore, Heather (Seanor) Malone, Maureen Corcoran, Jaimeson (Pierce) Foster and their teammates, the Pirates may not have a varsity team at all.

Though, to hear her compatriots tell it, Jaime was the true leader.

"Jaime started the process," Moore says. "She was really the point of contact, and we were all supporting [her] and we were all supporting each other, but Jaime was the true driver. She kind of took that role on and she's excellent with coordination, with paying attention to details. She's excellent with her communications and the rest of us were there doing the work alongside her and together."

Foster was a senior on the final club team back in 1993—a club which had become a dominant force in their ranks and had excellent pedigree in their own right. It's not as if the team which would eventually become a varsity side had no business doing so or did so solely for Title IX reasons or to make ECU look good, no, it certainly wasn't that.

One look at the players' resumes indicates that that isn't the case—for instance, Moore played in the same high school league as Mia Hamm, who Moore credits as a player going back to the '80s who showed her peers the way, that soccer could be something done seriously and with a high level of competitiveness. Moore talks about what it meant seeing Hamm leave for periods to go play with the U.S. Women's National Team and what it meant for her fellow players in Virginia and nationally, a group of players she refers to has the "Mia Hamm Generation."

Foster, too, was a player who would have been within herself to get a partial scholarship to play at another school, or to have a walk on spot somewhere, but back there and back then it simply wasn't affordable. So, she came to East Carolina, along with her twin sister, and paying her own way through school, she was ecstatic to learn that the Pirates had a club team.

"It was great," she says. "I didn't feel like we were missing anything."

Foster got to travel around and play other club teams. She and the team did so with lesser means than a varsity team might, but it was something, enough to scratch the itch.

Jaime Pierce Makes Save — *Foster saves a shot during the inaugural season. (Photo by Raine Pierce)*

Eventually she became the President of the club team, naturally serving as the point person for the betterment of the team. Her moment of truth came when the players realized that the athletics department may not be in compliance with Title IX. Working with faculty on campus and the Title IX office in Washington, D.C., Foster, along with her teammates, made the pitch to the ECU athletics administration.

Dave Hart, Jr., East Carolina Director of Athletics from 1987-95, says the decision to make the program official was easy, but there was a catch:

"We had no place to go for the facility." But he says, "That was the start of the discussions, 'Where can we house this program and how can we give them the best opportunity from a fan base perspective first, before a playing field?' So that was really the root of the start of the program."

Hart, it should be noted, was a tremendously effective athletics director for women's sports at ECU. Through programs like the Ladies First Campaign he not only raised more money for women's athletics but with that December 1993 announcement, he ushered in a new era in Greenville:

"East Carolina University will compete in women's soccer at the NCAA Division I level, beginning in 1994, announced ECU Director of Athletics, Dave Hart, Jr.," read the press release. "The school has added two women's sports in the last two years – women's indoor track and soccer."

It wasn't always going to be 1994, though. At the beginning, the players were told that the first year of competition would come in maybe 1995 or '96. The program was being elevated to the varsity level, but the players who made that happen weren't going to get to be a part of it, and that didn't sit right with them.

According to a 1994 article from the Daily Reflector, the group of Moore, Foster and Malone were honest publicly about their efforts to push for a team. Quoted in that article, Moore, then a senior, said, "They kept saying '95 or '96 it might happen, we made several attempts to talk to different people and finally got our foot in the door. It was just something we all pushed for and we all wanted. We looked into it a little bit and talked to a few people and said 'We need a team here.' I guess we believed in [our] hearts that we really wanted to play."

That quote resonates even now for Foster. She remembers that feeling of the vision being so close and the final push to get it over the line—and the reason for urgency in doing so:

"We were seniors," she says. "We wanted to play. We had one year left of eligibility and we wanted to play."

All of the players who spoke for this piece indicated that there were several tense meetings in the weeks and months following the initial decision to greenlight the program. There were discussions of Title IX lawsuits and public pressure. There were meetings with the administration that didn't go well.

But then there were meetings that went well. For that, Hart credits the players.

"I think that was actually a positive [the player's push]—it was a negative that we didn't have much to go on in terms of the facility—but I thought it was a positive that people were on board for us expediting," he says. "To the best of our abilities and to the best of the present configuration of where can we house this [team] until we find a permanent home. People were great, the campus was terrific in terms of their support of the concept, and we had a great response from young ladies who wanted to move in that direction."

The whole process, from the first discussion of making the push for a varsity team to getting the go ahead for a team to take the field in the fall of 1994, according to Moore was not more than 18 months. In college athletics terms, that is impossibly fast. No team gets up and running in that short a time without massive support, buy-in, and in today's world particularly, investment. For reference, it took two years from the time of the announcement to the time ECU lacrosse took the field in 2018, and that's from the announcement, not the mere idea.

Though, the problem persisted, despite the support and buy-in, that there was simply not a great place for the team to play. They wound up hosting their first five-game home slate in '94 at what was called the "ECU Soccer Field." That field, speaking generally, was a patch of grass behind Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium which was used previously as a practice field. The 1994 ECU Soccer Field is now the Shreve Silver Lot along Ficklen Drive.

It would have been natural for any 18–23-year-old to complain about the team's new digs. It was hardly a Division I stadium, what with the venerable Finley Field right down the road in Chapel Hill. In today's game the field would not even really rate as a quality practice field. But if the players had any gripes about the field, they remained mum. They just went about their business, and according to their AD, that's part of why the program still thrives now.

"The young ladies that were on that first team, they're the ones that deserve any credit for where they are today," said Hart. "They were all in, they never said, 'Gosh, is this the best we can do for a playing field?' They just went after it, and that's always the way that things get done. Once you have an announcement of a new team, people understand that that's going to take time. But that first class is critical, and they were phenomenal young ladies."

The field wasn't the only challenge. For the first year of the program, the men's and women's sides had to share a coach. Scooty Carey drew that responsibility, taking the unenviable and near impossible task of being the minder of two varsity teams. Even the great and recently retired Anson Dorrance wasn't able to sustain success doing that and he was doing it nearly a decade earlier. The game, both on the men's and women's side, had grown measurably by 1994.

Carey was aided by graduate assistant Colette Gilligan. Gilligan, who is still in the coaching ranks as the head coach of Division III side Hamilton College, was not much older than her players when she took over the day-to-day operations of the nascent ECU women's soccer program. The Dublin native gave it her all and tried her best to hold the players to their new varsity standards, something which took some getting used to for the players.

Malone recalls failing, in dramatic fashion, the team's two-mile trial run early on in their training. She also recalls that most of her teammates failed the test, finishing well over their 14-minute allotted time. It was an eye opener.

"[I was thinking] Oh my God, I'm not going to make the team because I'm not going to pass this running test," she says of the experience. "Like, how am I going to shave two minutes off of my time? It's not going to happen."

Malone describes the difficulty after the team's first hell week with her muscles feeling like "mashed potatoes." She considered quitting, she says, noting that for the club players, they had no experience with the kind of practices they were being put through to prepared for their first varsity season.

She and her teammates stuck it out, though, and on September 4, 1994, the East Carolina Pirates took the field in Fairfax, Va. for an NCAA Division I women's soccer game. George Mason was fourth in the nation at the time and coming off of a National Championship Game appearance. The Pirates were outmatched, and they knew it, and it showed on the field. It wound up as a 13-0 result which still stands as the second-highest margin in program history (behind James Madison's 14-0 effort later in '94 and Mason's 14-0 win in '95). Foster, to her credit, made 18 saves that day.

But the result didn't matter. This was a moral win, and in that, it was an absolute triumph.

"We learned a lot of humility that season," says Moore, continuing, "We made it through, we were all just proud of our accomplishments and what the future would be for the women's team."

That future, in the immediate sense, included the program's first goal, an Amy Warren tally in a 4-1 loss at Old Dominion, then just three games in, the program's first win.

On September 14, 1994 in Greenville, the Pirates took down UNCW by a score of 3-2. Two fledgling programs in their first years doing battle in an improbable meeting.

Stacey Schott scored the Pirates first goal on a header before Robyn DesPasquale pushed the team in front 2-1 and scored the decisive third goal a short time later. The Seahawks drew within one with a dozen minutes remaining, but the Pirates held serve for their first victory.

The Pirates celebrate their first victory, 3-2 over UNCW. — *The Pirates celebrate their first win, 3-2 over UNCW. (Photo by Raine Pierce)*

"We had to believe in ourselves before anybody else could believe in us and now it's coming around," Moore said at the time.

The Pirates would only go on to win one more game that season—an 8-0 thumping of Barton College—but the hardest step to any journey is inevitably the first and the 19 women on the inaugural squad had taken that doozy of an opening stride.

It takes great commitment to see through the journey of a program like ECU women's soccer's. When Johnson Stadium, one of the finest soccer facilities in America, was opened in 2011 it was a sign that East Carolina was steadfast in the desire to see this journey through.

"Our alumni have paved the way before us and they are a major part of our current success," says current head coach Gary Higgins. "We are excited to continue to grow our relationship with our alumni and every time we step on the field, we want to play with passion and represent them appropriately. Once a Pirate, always a Pirate."

Now, when the 1994 East Carolina women's soccer team returns for Alumni Day, they will do so in a facility that in a meaningful way they helped build. They will do so 30 years and one day after their win over UNCW. They will do so to see a program better positioned for success than they've ever been.

They will do so a million victories later, moral and otherwise.

Victories, Moral and Otherwise: 30 Years of East Carolina Women’s Soccer

"100%. Absolutely, no doubt in my mind."

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