Kurt Anderson watched as Augsburg University’s third goal of the Oct. 27 afternoon flew past Ben Westermeyer ’18, a direct free-kick that left the senior goalkeeper sprawling.
27 minutes later the halftime whistle blew. The team honored its six graduating seniors during the intermission, and then play continued. But nothing changed for the Oles, and after 90 minutes the final whistle blew on a 0-3 St. Olaf loss.
This loss would culminate a disappointing 5-13 2018 season, a year that saw Anderson notch his 300th career win as head coach, making him only the 19th active NCAA Division 3 men’s soccer coach to reach that number.
Six days later, Anderson announced his retirement. He ended his St. Olaf career with 301 total wins coaching the men’s team, four MIAC Coach of the Year honors, and a lasting memory in fans’ minds of a calm and composed touchline figure for which many knew no other. He had coached on the Hill for 30 years, taking over the program in 1989.
Over these 30 years the Oles only had seven losing seasons. But two of these seven came back-to-back in 2017 and 2018, the final two years of Anderson’s coaching tenure. The program, the fans, and Anderson himself all knew, as Augsburg’s free kick flew into the net, that it was time for a change.
On Dec. 18, after a little over a month had settled on the Oles’ season and Anderson’s departure, St. Olaf announced Travis Wall as its next head coach.
Wall, in many ways, represented a stark contrast to Anderson. Wall was only seven years out of his own collegiate soccer career at Ohio Wesleyan University, a career that saw him win both a National Championship with Ohio Wesleyan and National Player of the Year honors in 2011. After a stint as a professional player for the then-Minnesota Stars FC and his hometown Columbus Crew, alongside four years helping coach at his alma mater, Wall came to the Hill as an eager 28-year-old ready to make an immediate impact on an underperforming men’s soccer program.
“I remember vividly a phrase that was used to describe the state of the men’s soccer team was that ‘it was not empty cupboards’,” Wall said. “There were some talented pieces to work with. We just needed more of them, and we needed to have a culture of accountability and intrinsic motivation.”
St. Olaf saw in Wall a fresh young face to excite a hopeful soccer program. With this spattering of existing talent and a dedicated set of brand-new facilities, including a new dressing room and a new pitch at Rolf Mellby Field, Wall, he said, “hit the ground running” with the team. He immediately trimmed the roster, cutting the entire reserve team to focus solely on the top 30 or so players. He also pared down his coaching staff; where Anderson had five assistant coaches around him, Wall only had two — Justin Oliver and Ben Braman, who are both still with him, Oliver now as associate head coach.
These sudden changes mirrored Wall’s coaching philosophy — an attack-oriented, on-the-ball style that requires more focused and, often, more intense training. While on-the-field results came quickly — the team went from 5-13 in 2018 to 9-10 with a MIAC playoff berth in 2019 — it was not without some discomfort for the players who had to immediately adjust to a brand new system.
“I think we did things pretty differently than what they had grown accustomed to,” Wall said, speaking about the players he inherited upon coming to St. Olaf. “Some people didn’t want to stick around and, you know, no hard feelings. But we had a lot of guys who did choose to go through a coaching change and go through some uncomfortable moments.”
The College, it seemed, had gotten exactly what it wanted — a new coach with a clear philosophy who was ready, willing, and able to shake things up, for better or worse, and to build a solid foundation for a developing program, even if it meant facing some initial uncomfortability for both the coach and for his players.
“To be blunt, we didn’t have the skillset in our team to play the way that I have grown accustomed to coaching,” Wall continued. “We very much became a more defend-and-counterattack team that tried to take advantage of scoring on set pieces.”
This first transitional season on the Hill, in 2019, proved foundational for the team and for Wall as a coach. It was a balance, Wall explained, between going for broader changes far afield from what the players knew and playing in a way that would lead to more immediate success on the pitch.
“Before we talked about how we wanted to win, we needed to figure out how to win. So it wasn’t always pretty,” Wall said. “But in that year, I think we developed a lot of grit and toughness that is still with us today.”
The team spent a lot of the first season training on counterattacking moves and set pieces. As Wall explained, “It wasn’t the most fun practices, I’ll be honest with you. But it really did help us in our first year.”
After this pragmatic inaugural season, Wall got his first real run at recruiting potential talent to come play at St. Olaf. His first recruiting class — motivated by the team’s sudden improvement and the “buy-in” that Wall described he got from his current players — would prove to be transformative for the program.
12 first-years came to St. Olaf in the 2020-2021 academic year — nearly half the total team roster. As Wall explained, “We were a revolving door, bringing really good kids on campus that I thought could help us.” A fall season pushed into the spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic allowed this fresh crop of players to spend their first semester on the Hill training intensely together, drilling a new system that helped the team evolve from a defense-minded 4-2-3-1 formation into an attack-oriented 3-5-2.
Eight spring exhibition games in 2021 — makeup for the canceled 2020 season — allowed the new recruits to play together for the first time in a more relaxed environment, where they could try new tactics and play in an open, free-flowing style. These eight games provided the team with glimpses into what they could expect in their next full season. Two standout performances came on April 18 against Bethel University and May 1 against Concordia College. The Oles won these games 6-2 and 4-0 respectively, with first-years providing seven of the Oles’ total 10 goals scored.
Casey McCloskey ’24 was part of Wall’s first 12-man recruiting class. A speedy and aggressive forward out of Colorado, Wall made it clear to McCloskey what he was coming into at St. Olaf.
“He was so motivating, he really wanted to win,” McCloskey said of his first interactions with Wall. “My class was kind of meant to be the rebuilding class. I wanted to be a part of a rebuild, I wanted to be one of the main focal points in our team. I think throughout these past two years, we have been that.”
Although teams are usually hesitant of using the term “rebuild” to talk about their current position, Wall and the incoming group of underclassmen seemed to embrace the idea of rebuilding the program, fueled in large part by the older talent on the team.
“I think he came in kind of guns blazing,” Ian Elliott ’24, a vocal defender from Colorado, said. “It wasn’t well received at first, but I think he kind of knew what he had to do to instill that culture.”
Although many of the older players on the team graduated before St. Olaf’s most recent season, Elliott acknowledged their impact during he and the other current sophomores’s first year on the Hill.
Victor Gaulmin ’24, who followed his brother Lucas Gaulmin ’22 to St. Olaf, echoed Elliott. These “veterans” of the program, including Thierno Gueye ’22, who co-captained the team in 2021 with Lucas, helped develop the team culture within the locker room.
“I think a good quality we have is also the relationship in the team in the locker,” Victor said. “With the ex-captains like my brother Lucas and Thierno, they made a really good impact in the locker room to bring every player together.”
Throughout his first full season and the abbreviated exhibition year, Wall had time to instill in his team of young players a culture of “personal accountability and shared experiences,” as Wall explained. This cultural shift came in part through the intentional recruitment of players that Wall knew would share the buy-in of the team he had when he first came to St. Olaf, and in part through his own fostering of close personal relationships within the team. He instituted bi-weekly meetings with players where they would discuss anything from on-the-field tactics to class schedules to broader concerns about life on the Hill.
“By having a meeting set with every kid once every two weeks, at minimum you know you’re going to see me,” Wall said. “It makes it easier to talk about things.”
When I sat down to interview Coach Wall, we reclined in his office in two chairs in front of his desk, in a rather informal, conversational setting, a setting that mirrored the way Wall would have talks with his own players.
“It’s also part of the reason why I walk around to this chair, and I usually kick my feet up and relax,” Wall said. “Because this isn’t like a job interview, this isn’t a report card update. This is, ‘how is life going?’ Sometimes I try and meet guys up in the Cage, grab coffee, just to get out of the office.”
Wall continued, “I really believe that not just one of those meetings, but having them once every other week for one, two, three, four years with guys, it really stretches the roots of our relationships. They know that when I get on them about something, based on those [conversations], they’re always coming from a good place, never coming from an unhealthy place. It allows them the opportunity to give me feedback. It’s just a really good give-and-take relationship.”
Developing a team’s culture can be challenging and tedious, but Wall has facilitated the process through these one-on-one conversations with players that have helped them build trust in him as a coach and accountability within themselves as players.
“I really, really believe that those meetings have helped our culture more than a lot of things that we’ve done, because I’ve really gotten to learn how committed my players are,” Wall said. “And I would like to believe that they’ve also learned that I care about more than just winning. I care about how they’re doing academically, I care about how they’re doing socially here. And yes I do care about how they’re doing soccer-wise too, but it doesn’t need to be the only thing we ever talk about.”
The players themselves have greatly appreciated Wall’s personalized, individual focus, which bleeds over from a strong relationship between the coach and players into stronger bonds within the team as a whole.
“I think that’s allowed us all to build a really cool bond with our coach,” McCloskey said. “Because I think in a lot of sports it’s only just caring about what you’re doing on the field, and Travis really goes beyond that and gets to know us as people and just to make sure that we’re doing well and enjoying our time here.”
“If I can only say one word for the season, I would say the relationship between players,” Victor Gaulmin said. “That’s the most important part.”
As soccer is a sport that revolves around on-the-field relationships, Wall attributes this more holistic approach to off-the-field player development to much of the team’s success in the 2021 season — a season that saw Wall’s first recruiting class jump from incoming potential into established talent.
In their first game of the full 2021 season, an out-of-conference match at Central College, Wall fielded a team of one first-year, eight sophomores, one junior, and only one senior — Lucas Gaulmin, a midfield fixture and captain of the team throughout the season. This core of sophomore talent would lead the team to a 15-2-1 regular season and as far as the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Division 3 tournament — tying the team’s best-ever finish in the entire history of men’s soccer at St. Olaf.
Wall’s recruiting going into the season shored up any gaps that might have persisted while transitioning from the 4-2-3-1 formation into the much wider and more attacking 3-5-2 formation, a style of play that Wall notes his players bought into completely. “I can safely say we played a 3-5-2 the entire year,” Wall said of the 2021 season.
In brief, a 3-5-2 formation consists of three defenders, three central midfielders, two wide wingbacks, and two forwards. The nucleus of St. Olaf’s 3-5-2 formation were all underclassmen. Elliott played in the middle of the three defenders, roaming in front of goalkeeper Austin Williams ’24 in a protective and organizing role. Ethan Kilmer ’24 sat at the base of the three central midfielders, alongside a rotating combination that always included Victor Gaulmin somewhere in front.
Sometimes Victor would be paired with his brother Lucas in the middle. At other times it was Victor and Clemente Arcuch Puig ’24 in front of Kilmer. Regardless, Victor — St. Olaf’s first-team All-American honoree — always occupied a place in the center of the Ole team.
A similar interaction took place on St. Olaf’s wings, with a rotating cast of windbacks occupying each side of the pitch but with Shea Bechtel ’25 and Jordan Oberholtzer ’24 finding themselves starting more often than not. Bechtel would come out of the season with MIAC Rookie of the Year honors, scoring 11 goals and assisting eight others in his first season on the Hill, while Oberholtzer contributed three goals and four assists himself.
And up front in the 3-5-2 were forwards McCloskey and Hakeem Morgan ’24. Morgan earned second-team All-American honors after recording a team-high in both goals and assists, with 15 and nine respectively. Morgan’s prolific output was propelled by McCloskey’s rapid movement on- and off-the-ball, often darting into midfield or out wide to open up space for Morgan in the middle. The combination play up front between McCloskey and Morgan helped St. Olaf score 67 goals on the season, good enough for eighth in the country.
The two understand their individual strengths and limitations well, developed through hours spent training together both during and outside of team practices and through living together as roommates.
“Casey’s faster than me, so I get the ball more to my feet and Casey’s able to take people on and go in behind,” Morgan explained. “So I hold the ball, make passes, or turn. I create a lot more for others, and Casey creates a lot for himself too.”
“Hakeem Morgan is a very big guy, great left foot, but he’s not very fast, so we needed somebody to complement that,” McCloskey said. “Luckily I was that person. I’m not as big, I’m technical and fast, so it’s always Hakeem checking to the ball, kind of drawing the defenders in, and if that’s not open it’s me running right behind him and getting behind the lines.”
As McCloskey alluded to, much of St. Olaf’s offense is determined by Morgan’s movement when he doesn’t have the ball. But one of St. Olaf’s definite strengths in the attack, highlighted by both the players and Wall, is their versatility. Bechtel and Oberholtzer on the wings and Gaulmin in the middle pose a number of threats that can be difficult for an opposing team to deal with all at once.
“I drive more into the midfield, Casey drives more in behind or into space or out wide,” Morgan said. “Having Victor in the middle just opens everything up because he’s so good. If you just give him a little bit of space he’s going to put the ball where it needs to be.”
He continued, “For us three, if you focus too much on me, then you have Victor and Casey that can hurt you. If you focus on me then you have the other two. I think that’s the biggest thing on our team, we have so many players that can make stuff happen, so it’s very difficult to go against us and to stop us.”
“I think the thing I’m most proud of is that we’re a very balanced team,” Wall said. “And what I mean by that is we didn’t score all of our goals from, you know, connecting 30 passes out of the back. We scored a bunch of set pieces, we did score some goals building from the back and connecting a bunch of passes, and then we were lethal in transition, and I think that is the name of the game to be successful in college soccer.”
And the glue that holds these various approaches to play together is communication, which is bolstered when there are strong bonds developed between players and coaches off the field.
“Communication is a big part during the game,” Victor Gaulmin said. “I think the relation is also a big part, if you have a good relationship with the guys you are going to play well. If your brain is connected with a guy, your feet are going to be connected too.”
Communication ensures that if, for instance, Bechtel makes a run in behind, down the wing, Victor can spot his movement and pick out the pass, while Kilmer in midfield can move over and fill in the gap. It’s a dynamic, evolving approach to the game that Wall drills over and over during training, using four-versus-four and eight-versus-eight possession games to practice passing combinations and on-the-ball technique. “It’s a good possession activity, but in itself it’s a really good transition activity,” Wall said. “We’re training what our reactions are to losing the ball.”
Training takes a heightened importance during the team’s off-season, where much of next season’s success is determined by work put in during the winter and spring. One indication that Wall’s culture has taken hold is the extent of training players have done over the past several months. The team’s close-knit relationships translated into countless hours spent practicing together by themselves, outside any urging by Wall or the other coaches.
“I think when you’re mediocre for a little while and then you blow up and have a great season, it’s very easy to just take victory laps for too long and live in your glory days,” Wall said. “But our guys are not doing that. They’re very, very hungry right now and it has me very excited as their coach.”
This hunger for the upcoming season will be critical as the Oles face a more challenging slate of games and heightened expectations to compete.
“Next year is going to be super hard. It’s a new challenge,” Wall said. “We have a harder non-conference schedule. It’s got some great games on it including a rematch with North Park in Chicago, and then we play [the University of] Chicago two days later, who made the final four. So we have some marquee games. But that’s how we get better, we play really good teams. We’ll have a target on our back because of our season last year, it’s a new challenge for us to maintain.”
Having a target on their backs, as Wall noted, is something his players have embraced, not shied away from. Both Elliott and McCloskey, in our conversations, said that “we want every team’s best game.”
“That’s something that excites us,” Elliott said about the team’s new challenge. “We want to get every team’s best game, because when it comes down to those later games in the tournament, we’re going to be ready to play those better teams.”
With a more challenging schedule and new expectations, what do the players think their goal should be for their next two seasons on the Hill?
“I will say win the national championship,” Victor Gaulmin said. “I think we can do it, or at least the final four. I would say my goal is to do the final four next season, and if everything goes well, senior year I will say win the national championship.”
Morgan agrees — “I really think we can win the national title. This year I feel like we had so much more to do but it didn’t go our way sadly. But next year I really feel like we can win the national tournament.”
“I think we’re in the mix to definitely be part of that conversation,” McCloskey said about challenging for the Final Four and the national title, finishing our conversation.
But reaching such heights won’t happen without motivation and determined off-season work, which Victor Gaulmin, one of next year’s team captains, stressed to me over email.
“We know that it will be really difficult because we are not the only good team who want to win it,” Victor wrote, referencing the national title. “And we just had a good season so it could be cocky or arrogant to say that, but we have a young and talented group of players. We have to deserve it with, first, a good work rate during the off-season and after a good season.”
Wall, like Victor, is more wary of placing such significant expectations on the team coming immediately after one impressive year.
“I’m very cognizant of not wanting to come off arrogant after having a great season. When we say the expectation is a conference championship after we had one good season, that can be misconstrued,” Wall said. “We hope to be playing in valuable postseason games every single year we’re here.” But, he did note that “ambition is at an all time high.”
“When you get to the Sweet 16 and lose in the 85th minute in a pretty even game, it leaves you feeling like, man, we were so close to going further,” Wall continued.
His goal, as the head coach and guiding figure, is to build a robust men’s soccer program, a program which can produce teams that are consistent national contenders long after the current group of players has moved on.
“When I look at what’s possible at St. Olaf, I don’t handcuff us. I think we have everything we need to be a perennial national program,” Wall said.
But even with Wall’s more pragmatic, long-term approach to developing men’s soccer at St. Olaf, you can’t help but feel that the current team is a special group of players with a ceiling as high as they want to make it.
“A lot of teams have circled the day they get to play us next year,” Wall said. “I think that’s going to be an awesome challenge.”
Featured image courtesy of St. Olaf Athletics
