Less than three weeks after former head coach Stacy Strauss announced her resignation, after 13 seasons at the helm, Ohio Athletics announced her replacement Saturday.
Aaron Rogers was named the new head coach of the Bobcats, after spending the past three seasons as an assistant at Kentucky, which was his third coaching stop in the Southeastern Conference.
Rogers also has previous collegiate coaching experience at Florida, Alabama and South Alabama, while he also worked with the nationally prominent Cardinal Soccer Club in Cincinnati.
“I’m extremely excited to be at a wonderful university with such a great history and tradition,” Rogers said. “I want to help develop a program and continue to develop a program that (my predecessors) are proud of. There should be some great success, hopefully immediately in 2013.”
He also said he will immediately get on the road to get top-recruits, especially from Ohio, and that he is going to start on Friday and continue through the holidays.
Aside from recruits, Rogers wants to look at potentially scheduling teams with higher a RPI for the non-conference portion of the schedule, in effort to be selected as an at-large team for the NCAA Tournament. Two Mid-American Conference teams were selected to the tournament this past season.
“The biggest adjustment for me will be that if we stink, then it’s all on my shoulders,” Rogers said about being a first-time head coach. “But, I don’t think there is anything that I will see as a head coach, that I didn’t see as an assistant.”
Rogers emphasized that one of his goals for success is to keep clean sheets, so he is pleased that junior goalkeeper Mattie Liston is returning for her senior season, as she is Ohio’s all-time saves leader.
The Bobcats finished 8-10-1 during the 2012 campaign and won just three of their 10 conference matches, but with up-to 24 members of the team returning, Rogers could not say enough how excited he is to started.
