Marian is the top-seeded team in the NAIA women's college soccer tournament and, after 12-hour bus trips to Pensacola, Florida, will play fellow Crossroads League foe Taylor.
The Knights (19-0-2) will stay in a hotel next to the 16-seed Trojans (14-2-3) before they play in the Round of 16, four wins from a national championship, with ambiguous end dates for their trips.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“The Crossroads League is, this season, like the SEC of women's soccer in NAIA,” Marian coach Justin Sullivan said not long after being named its Coach of the Year. “Five teams out of 40 in the national field, and four of those five are able to progress to the Sweet 16. It's pretty unprecedented.”
The other two Crossroads League teams still playing are three-seeded Indiana Wesleyan, which will face No. 14 Keiser, and No. 7 Grace College, which will play No. 10 Truett McConnell.
Marian, which has now played in the NAIA national tournament in each of Sullivan’s first five seasons as coach of the Knights, will be the clear favorite against Taylor, but Taylor was one of Marian’s two ties on the season, and the other, a penalty kicks hiccup against Grace, prevented them from winning the conference championship.
The Trojans have been a bit of recent nemesis for Marian to the extent that Knights’ leading scorer, senior midfielder Katie Koger (14 goals, 5 assists and recently named the conference’s player of the year) has never beaten them. After playing her high school soccer at Guerin Catholic, Koger played her freshman season at Indiana State and then transferred to Marian. The two teams tied, 2-2, in her first year in the program, and Taylor won, 1-0, in 2024.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“The style of play versus each other … just makes for a fun game,” Koger says. “We have such a familiarity with each other just because, like, obviously we play each other during conference and stuff, but I feel like this is such a rivalry game, too … it just, every year, is a weird game. I don't know how else to explain it.”
One way to explain it this season is that Taylor’s first-team, all-league goalkeeper Brianna Rawlings, who came from Las Vegas to play for the Trojans, has only conceded seven goals during her senior season. And Taylor comes into Monday’s 11 a.m. contest with a 3-2-3 record against ranked teams.
They will, however, without be without their leading scorer, junior Eliza Luttrell (12 goals, 8 assists), in this one. The all-conference performer tore her ACL toward the end of the regular season, so they’ve looked to another first-teamer, senior and former Noblesville High School star Kiana Siefert (6 goals, 7 assists), among others, to pick up that slack.
Taylor senior Kiana Siefert, from Noblesville, is an instrumental part of the Trojans' attack with six goals and seven assists.No one on the Taylor side was exactly able to find the back of the net against the higher-ranked Central Methodist team that the Trojans recently ousted from the national tournament in creative fashion.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe lone goal in the game was an own goal by Central Methodist, and the play was a direct result of Taylor’s game plan.
“We’d watched film on them,” Taylor’s 18th-year coach, Scott Stan, said, “and we saw that on really hard crosses, since they only play with three defenders, they were running back to their goal, and they lost the conference tournament championship on an own goal from a hard cross. We did the exact same thing.”
This Round of 16 game marks the farthest Taylor has ever gotten in the national tournament, but Marian does have one player, senior midfielder Marian Corro Celma, who featured prominently in the team’s run to the national championship back in 2022. Her name may not jump off the stat sheet (2 goals, 3 assists), but the holding midfielder and team captain from Puebla, Mexico, was on the all-conference first team list, and she seems acutely aware of what’s at stake — win or season over — this time against Taylor.
“I'm appreciating every moment of it,” she said. “I’ve been having the mentality all season of, like, just go out there on the field and enjoy every moment … this has been amazing, and I'm just so lucky to have literally the best team, and they just make every day so special … We just need to be the best version of ourselves.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: NAIA women's soccer tournament: Marian, Taylor, Crossroads League teams
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