Stefan Cleveland didn’t necessarily have graduate school in mind when he matriculated at Dartmouth College four years ago. It just happened. Being able to stop a soccer ball helped.
Having backstopped the Big Green men’s soccer program to back-to-back Ivy League titles and a pair of NCAA tournament berths, Cleveland is finishing out his collegiate career in different colors. With a year of athletic eligibility remaining following his Dartmouth days, Cleveland moved closer to home and joined the University of Louisville men’s soccer program, hoping for one more year to play while he contemplated the future.
It’s gone splendidly. With Cleveland playing every minute of every game, the Cardinals went into the NCAA second round on Sunday with the fourth seed in the 48-school tournament. Where he might have been tending net in American professional soccer’s backwaters, if at all, Cleveland instead has a legitimate chance at a national collegiate championship.
He isn’t the first Ivy Leaguer to do this. He probably won’t be the last.
“To be honest, it didn’t come up until near the end of last year,” Cleveland said in a phone interview last week. “(Dartmouth coach) Chad Riley had mentioned it to me. In mid-November, he got emails from schools with an interest. I didn’t even realize I had a fifth year at that point; it wasn’t something that was on my mind.
“I knew I wanted to pursue soccer further than just last season. I didn’t know whether I was coming back to college again or going pro. That kind of opened up a range of opportunities.”
Cleveland’s Louisville odyssey came about with and without the help of the Ivy League.
While the league gives medical redshirt years to athletes who lose a season to injury, it doesn’t offer them to athletes who simply don’t play for a year. That happened to Cleveland as a Dartmouth freshman in 2012; with two experienced goalkeepers in front of him in Noah Cohen and Sean Donovan, Cleveland saw no action on the pitch for the Big Green and, hence, was never docked that year of athletic eligibility.
The 6-foot-2, 185-pound native of Dayton, Ohio, rapidly improved from there. He split the 2013 campaign with current Dartmouth senior James Hickok before grabbing the reins over his last two Big Green campaigns.
Cleveland played nearly 2,700 minutes in goal as a Dartmouth junior and senior, posting a 19-8-3 record with 15 shutouts. He earned first-team all-Ivy distinction both seasons and was named the league’s defensive player of the year last fall, each time guiding the Big Green to the second round of the NCAA tourney.
“He’s very solid,” Riley said. “Sometimes people don’t take consistency as a big trait, but as a goalkeeper that’s huge. He brought the same mentality and same level of performance every game and training session. He was a good leader by example and very serious about it.”
Louisville coach Ken Lolla needed an upgrade in goal this year if his Cardinals were to maintain a presence this year near the top of the Atlantic Coast Conference, arguably the top college soccer league in the nation. The Cards went 7-9-3 in 2015 with a team 1.50 goals-against average, not horrible but not the elite level necessary to compete in the ACC or NCAA.
“One of the areas where we underperformed was in goal; it cost us on a number of different occasions,” Lolla said in a phone interview last week. “Out of that goalkeeper crew, we thought one of them was going to rise to the top and take control of the goalkeeper situation for us. Unfortunately, it never happened, for various reasons; we had injuries during the year, of course, and a little bit of inexperience. It was something, after the season, we determined to rectify.”
Cleveland could have found himself in a very awkward situation, entering out of the blue with senior keeper Theo Jamilloux returning and three shot-stoppers in the pipeline. Instead, Cleveland said he’s entered a supportive atmosphere.
“At this high of a level, in college, people know that in the goal it will be one guy,” Cleveland said. “It’s a competition every day in training. At the end of the day, when we’re off the field, we’re all friends. We have a great team, a great dynamic. We have five goalkeepers here, and we’re all really good friends. We push ourselves on the field. When we’re off the field, we’re a good group.”
Cleveland isn’t the first Dartmouth soccer player to take a fifth year elsewhere once done in Hanover. A former teammate, midfielder Gabe Stauber, joined Fordham for his final soccer season last year. Former Big Green point guard Alex Mitola went from Dartmouth to George Washington, where he won an NIT title with the Colonials while in graduate school.
Riley noted two other former Ivy League goalkeepers, Brown’s Mitchell Kupstas and Princeton’s Ben Hummel, used a holdover athletic year to tend net at Duke. Kupstas split time with another grad student during the 2015 campaign; Hummel was a seldom-used backup this fall.
“People realize that the Ivy League is a good level of soccer, and you’re getting a mature student to your school,” Riley said of fifth-year transfers. “Especially with goalkeepers and a position where you have a specific need to fill a hole, they’re kind of looking through every avenue to build a good team.”
Being two hours from home has enabled Cleveland’s parents to see more of his matches, he said. Owner of a Dartmouth engineering degree, he’s now pursuing an MBA but not certain of where he’ll go with it. There’s still soccer likely to be played.
“They had a good team last year but, for whatever reason, they were on the wrong side of tight results,” Cleveland said of Louisville. “We’re having a good season. We’re the No. 4 team in the NCAA. It’s awesome. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience.”
Greg Fennell can be reached at gfennell@vnews.com or 603-727-3226.