The Sacramento State women’s soccer team will have teams gunning for them all season, and the players are well aware of it.

“We will, in a way, have a target on our back,” said first year head coach Randy Dedini. “That’s just an extra challenge for our girls to have to step up to.”

That “target” is thanks to a preseason coaches’ poll in which Sac State was picked to finish first in the Big Sky Conference, a year removed from nearly taking the title. The poll asked every head coach in the conference to rank every team, save for his or her own, based upon how they expect Sac State to finish.

Sac State edged Montana by one point, receiving two first-place votes. It is the first time in the womens soccer program’s 14-year history that they have received a first place ranking. However, Dedini is far from satisfied with the ranking.

“We’re not taking anything for granted,” Dedini said. “We have to take it one game at a time and then hope to be there in the end.”

The team has had a tumultuous time over the past several months. They ended the 2006 season by suffering a loss to Idaho State in the Big Sky Conference Championship game. The game ended in a tie and was settled by penalty kicks, where the team pushed it to sudden death before falling short.

The team also lost its head coach, Katie Poynter, who had been with the program for three years and helped raise them from the cellar of the conference to a level of high respectability.

“Three years ago, we were picked to finish dead last in the conference,” Dedini said.

Also gone via transfer are Katie Rorabaugh and Beverly Goebel, two promising young freshmen players. Goebel was a particularly strong contributor, racking up 10 points and six assists in her first season.

Dedini said the team was prepared to head into the season having lost two starters, but due to some early injuries, the team entered the regular season with five new starters.

One of the injured starters is senior forward Kayelyn Satkowski, who last year led the team in scoring with nine goals and was considered the team’s offensive MVP. She tore her anterior cruciate ligament in the spring, and has yet to see any playing time this season.

As if the injury issues weren’t enough to deal with, Dedini himself has had to adjust to his new position as head coach. After serving as an assistant under Poynter for the last three years, Dedini was a natural choice to succeed her. Although he has played soccer at the professional level and has served as a high school and collegiate assistant coach, this will mark the first time Dedini walks the sidelines as the head coach of a collegiate soccer squad.

Regardless, he is confident that the team’s performance will stay strong under his direction.

“Things haven’t changed a whole lot from the last couple of years, because I still felt like I had a pretty strong coaching voice in my role as the assistant,” Dedini said. “Now I have the main voice as the head coach.”

Also new to the team is assistant coach Maureen Whitney, who Dedini brought in to help in all phases of the soccer program. Whitney previously worked as an assistant coach for the Sac State women’s soccer team from 2000-2003, is a Sac State alumna, and earned her bachelors degree in criminal justice in 2001.

Whitney said that being involved with her alma mater is “one of the major factors” as to why she returned to coach at Sac State. Whitney also said she stayed current on the progress of the team and was pleased with what she saw.

“I agree with what’s gone on in the past couple of years here,” Whitney said.

“She’s been able to come in and make what we’ve been doing just a little bit better,” Dedini said.

The team has seniors forward Katie McCoy and midfielder Katie Burton, who, along with midfielder Sarah Howard, serve as team captains returning. McCoy, a first team All-Big Sky selection for the second time last year, entered the regular season fourth in school history with 41 career points. She also scored two goals in the first game of this season, against Mount St. Mary’s, which the team beat 4-0. Burton was named the team’s defensive MVP in 2006, as well as a second team All-Big Sky selection.

Regardless of any adversity or complications the team faced, Dedini has high expectations for the players based on their dedicated offseason program and last year’s near-championship. “We have the confidence to go into every game thinking that we should come out on top,” Dedini said. Whitney is equally confident and expects the team will be back in the Big Sky Championship game at season’s end. “I see no reason why we shouldn’t be,” Whitney said.

Fernando Gallo can be reached at [email protected].