Stanford, Duke vie for first College Cup

Stanford forward Lindsay Taylor has friends at school who have won national championships and others who've already started their own businesses.

That cauldron of excellence has brought Taylor and her Cardinal teammates to the brink of the school's first women's soccer national championship, to be contested Sunday afternoon against Duke at Kennesaw State.

"We're all sort of pushing each other to be better at whatever it is you're good at individually," said Taylor, the Pac-12 player of the year and a candidate for the Hermann Trophy, given to the nation's top soccer player.

The team standing in Stanford's way knows plenty about that.

"People talk about the Ivies being the academic institutions, but I think Duke and Stanford mix athletics and academics the best," said Duke midfielder Nicole Lipp, who was also recruited by Stanford. "I think we're very similar. Just on opposite coasts."

Stanford and Duke's rosters are littered with members of U.S. youth national teams and aspiring doctors, in at least one case the same player. Their coaches often go head-to-head for prospects who can make the cut on the field and on their transcripts.

"We recruit against each other a lot because I feel we sell the same thing – we both sell a world-class education while playing in some of the top women's soccer conferences in the country," Duke coach Robbie Church said.

Stanford tied for No. 5 in the most recent U.S. News & World Report ratings of national universities, five spots ahead of Duke, the only two top-10 schools that are members of FBS conferences. Duke has won 12 national championships, including eight beginning in 2001. Stanford has won a staggering 101 NCAA titles, including at least one every year for the past 35 years.

The rockhead quotient is low. Duke's team GPA last spring was 3.4. Blue Devils defender Maddy Haller was named a third-team Academic All-American this week. Forward Mollie Pathman, who scored two goals in Duke's semifinal victory over Wake Forest, holds a 3.92 GPA majoring in psychology with plans to attend medical school. She pulled three A's and one B-plus last spring despite missing six weeks with the U.S. under-20 national team.

"I was lucky," said Pathman, who studied so much in high school her parents had to take her textbooks away. "Every week I was gone fell in an off-lab week, so I never missed any labs."

Stanford's roster includes midfielder Teresa Noyola, who holds a 3.52 GPA with a double major in math and computer science and was named the Pac-12 women's soccer scholar-athlete of the year. At least five Cardinal players major in human biology, a pre-med concentration.

The weight of schoolwork and soccer – Stanford is top-ranked and unbeaten, Duke is No. 3 in the country – does get balanced. Noyola said the Stanford locker room is intentionally a haven for jokes and light-heartedness. At Duke's hotel Thursday night, a team-wide game of Charades got so loud that hotel security had to quiet the room down.