The Purdue Northwest men’s soccer team is shaking up its roster, starting with a new head coach to lead the charge.
Luke Dunn, who joined the staff last winter, is the new PNW men’s soccer team coach. He came to PNW after two years at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin, were he led the NAIA program to a 31-3-2 record and its first national top-25 ranking in decades.
His mission is to duplicate that success here. So far, he has. The Pride have yet to suffer a loss through five contests, posting a 3-0-2 record.
“[The biggest challenge] has been a lot of growing as a team,” he said. “When you look at our roster, half of them are returners and half are new. Trying to blend everyone together has probably been the biggest thing we’re trying to accomplish.”
Returners are led by two all-GLIAC players, defenseman Martin Murillo and midfielder Ryan Moran, who was the lone all-region selection for the Pride last season. The Pride also welcomed back senior goalie in Eligh Williams, who just won the GLIAC Defensive Player of the Week.
The new wave of talent is led by senior forward Hugo Lorenzo, a transfer student from William Penn University in Iowa, who shared the stage with Williams by winning the GLIAC Offensive Player of the Week. Alongside him is grad student defenseman Flavio Nardecchia, who played at St. Andrews University in South Carolina; junior midfielder Marco Ussi, who transferred from Bergen Community College in New Jersey, and senior forward Jacob Battista, who played at Viterbo.
Mixing returning players with new recruits can be challenging, but Dunn sees positives for the team.
“There is an advantage to being a returner and then there’s an advantage of being a newcomer,” he said. “The advantage of being a returner is … They got a chance to work [together] for the last four months.
“For the incoming guys, we were very intentional about the type of players we recruited and having players that fit the system we wanted to play,” Dunn said.
The new coach is actually a retread. Before Viterbo, Dunn served as an assistant PNW coach under his now-predecessor Ryan Hayes.
“[PNW] is kind of where I got into the nitty gritty of the coaching profession,” he said. “I had a great experience working with Coach Hayes. It’s been good to get back to somewhere that for me was a very positive experience and has given me a great start in my coaching career.
“It was a very fortunate occurrence when the job opened up,” he said. “I am much closer to home. My wife is a PNW alum as well. It is kind of a homecoming for both of us.”
Dunn has big plans for the team.
“One thing I tell players is that you have to be brave enough to set goals and be intentional about them,” he said. “One of our goals as a team is to win our conference. No team at the school has won a team GLIAC championship before.”
But he said he knows it will not happen without hard work.
“A lot of it is being intentional,” he said. “You start to create some common ground amongst [players]. Once you break things down, there are things they have a lot in common. All of those little encounters help them grow closer as a team.”
Dunn said the team wants to overcome last year’s slump. After a nine-win 2021 campaign, their best season since 2018, the team ended last year’s season 6-8-4. The Pride was sent home in the second round of the GLIAC Tournament
“I think in team sports, there are different ways to measure success,” said Dunn. “The first thing we want to say is ‘did we get better?’ … That is the baseline.”
