CARY, NORTH CAROLINA – With three of the four participants in this year’s NCAA Men’s College Cup hailing from the Atlantic Coast Conference, you can’t blame Akron if they feel like party crashers, but the fact is it’s Caleb Porter’s unbeaten, untied and #1 Zips who are the team of greatest interest here at soccer’s version of the Final Four.

Can Akron, coming from the Mid-American Conference, defeat a pair of college soccer heavyweights from the vaunted ACC and win the national title?

Despite a tough non-conference schedule, will the pressure of college soccer’s biggest event prove too much for the boys from the little school in Northeast Ohio?

Darlington Nagbe (Photo by Eff Harwell, Zips Photography)

Will all the discussion about Caleb Porter possibly being on his way to another destination following the season, possibly MLS or possibly a school like Clemson or Indiana, prove to be too much a distraction?

Or will the Zips do what they’ve done all year and take care of business on the field, making converts across the nation and especially here at the College Cup?

Matches begin Friday, with Wake Forest playing Virginia in an all-ACC matchup at 5 p.m. EST, and the Zips facing last year’s national runner-up, North Carolina, at 7:30.

Thursday was a day for a final practice session here at WakeMed Stadium in this Raleigh suburb, and also a chance for the teams to talk about their chances with members of the media.

Akron Zips (23-0-0 and Mid American Conference champion)

Porter dismissed the discussion about his future, saying simply that he is focused on the job at hand this weekend.

“I’ve heard those rumors,” he said. “When you have a season like we’ve had there is bound to be speculation, but right now I am focused on the University of Akron. I have addressed this issue with my team and we are a family. We understand that speculation is speculation. Reality is reality.”

But the squad is definitely entering the weekend with something to prove.

“It has been a great year but we are not satisfied with being in the College Cup. Our goal is to win the national championship,” he said. “We know North Carolina is a good team and if we make mistakes they will punish those mistakes. We will have to be at our best to win, but we have learned to play a certain way and we are not going to change that for North Carolina or anybody else.”

Alex Dixon (Photo couretsy of North Carolina Athletics)

Leading goalscorer Teal Bunbury (17 goals) said the team isn’t worried about whether other people think they are for real.

“If there are doubters then we’ll just have to go out and prove ourselves,” he said. “We’re not really thinking about anyone else.”

North Carolina Tar Heels (16-2-3 and ACC regular season co-champion)

Elmar Bolowich is impressed with the Akron defense (seven goals allowed in 23 matches), and spoke at length about it.

“They’ve had quite a few shutouts, which tells me their defense plays well. I know that they are a hardworking team. Their transition into defense is very quick,” Bolowich said. “When I look at the statistics from game to game, they pretty much have dominated the teams that they have played. They have gotten the results in that fashion by playing tight defense and still not compromising going for goals.”

The Tar Heels, who lost in last year’s final to Maryland, have a pretty stingy defense of their own, surrendering 12 goals in 21 matches, but they’ve also banged in 43 tallies, led by Billy Schuler’s nine. Schuler is a cultured striker and former U17 MNT player who makes excellent runs off the ball. He admitted this can be a more difficult proposition in college soccer.

“The defenders are a lot more physical. You try to find more space between the players,” Schuler said. “You are battling the defenders the whole time, which makes it a lot more difficult. You play smarter and try to find holes.”

Virginia Cavaliers (17-3-3 and ACC Tournament champion)

Greg Monaco (Photo courtesy of Virginia Athletics)

Virginia coach George Gelnovatch agreed that this year’s version of the squad has made a lot of progress from beginning to now. He said this wasn’t so much by design, but credited forward Will Bates’ move from out wide to a truer striker position as having been key.

“Sometimes there are things you have control over and some things you don’t. I certainly would not have forecast or predicted the rough start for us,” Gelnovatch said. “Our mentality the first half of the season really had to be to dig our heels in and make sure the other team doesn’t score. That’s who we were. (Will) was playing more of a wide position for us, and it was a conscious decision to move him. We felt that the other combinations we were using with that position weren’t effective for us. It was about that time that things started to get a little easier for us. It didn’t happen overnight.”

Bates agreed that the move helped him to score 12 goals so far this season.

“At first it was a struggle for me to score goals from out wide,” he said. “I wasn’t used to playing that position. I’m more of a natural center-forward, but coach stuck with me even when I wasn’t scoring many goals early on, which gave me a lot of confidence. He kept telling me that goals would come. Once the goals started coming it became a lot easier and I started getting used to playing with my teammates.”

Defense was clearly a key for the Cavaliers this season, as Gelnovatch noted.

“The word I’ve used is grinding,” he said. “We kept that blue-collar mentality of not giving up goals to keep us in games, not only as a back four and our goalkeeper and midfielders, but collectively as a team as well.”

Wake Forest Demon Deacons (17-3-3 and regular season co-champion)

Austin da Luz (Photo courtesy of Wake Forest Athletics)

Jay Vidovich was adamant early in the season that his squad was not a top 5 team nationally, despite the preseason assertions of TopDrawerSoccer.com and other media outlets, but look who is in the College Cup again.

Vidovich still feels a lot of progress had to take place over the season for this to happen.

“I basically thought the media were full of crap. We lost nine guys to the pros and another player to injury. We were very young and inexperienced and I didn’t see how during preseason time we could be thought to be a top five team,” Vidovich said. “This senior group has filled in a big void with a lot of tremendous players leaving our program. I think they’ve done a tremendous job with leadership and getting us back here to Cary.

“We did everything a lot better,” Vidovich continued in explaining how the team improved. “The way we defended, we were much more compact as a team. We defended with more urgency and attacked. We were finding more ways of getting Zack (Schilawski) the ball to finish and Austin (da Luz) has done a tremendous job of servicing different players.”

Wake’s standout winger Austin da Luz mentioned the senior class helping younger players along as an important part of the team’s progression.

“As a senior class we’ve seen just about all there is to see in college soccer. I think bringing in the young guys along is just more of us acting like we’ve been there and showing composure in difficult situations, just kind of setting an example,” he said. “They’re all at Wake Forest for a reason because they show those characteristics and they have the potential to become the players that we like to think we’ve become at this point in our careers.”