College Cup: Williams a hit for FSU

by Travis Clark

December 6, 2014

BOCA RATON, Florida — The success of transfers in collegiate soccer can sometimes be as hit or miss as recruiting at the club level.

Players must adjust to new surroundings, teammates and sometimes a higher level of play. For Florida State forward Cheyna Williams however, the move from the SEC to the ACC has been a runaway success.

Williams, a dynamic goal-scorer for two seasons at Vanderbilt and a 2013 First Team All SEC performer, joined the Seminoles in January 2014. Twenty-five games and 14 goals later, she’s an integral part of another banner year in Tallahassee, and is preparing for her first national title game.

“I’m just so honored and blessed to be on the team with so many high level players,” Williams said. “Dagny [Brynjarsdottir] and [Kristin Grubka] are obviously exceptional, but I have players like Bella [Schmid] that I can’t even picture someone better on the ball than her. Other players like Kirsten Crowley who saves a ball off the line [against Stanford]. I just feel like as a team, it’s great to be around exceptional players.”

In the Seminoles’ 4-2-3-1 formation, Williams has 23 starts mostly as the lone forward up front. It's a position that requires a diversity of talent, from holding up the ball, combining with teammates, and not to mention scoring goals.

That part of her game started with a trickle in 2014, as Williams scored three goals in her first eight games of the regular season. But in the NCAA tournament, with more reps both in practices and in games under her belt, Williams has improved her understanding with the rest of her team and played a pivotal role in the push to Sunday’s title game.

With two goals against Stanford in Friday’s semifinal, Williams has six goals in five NCAA tournament games, including the last four tallies FSU has scored.

“Cheyna is an exceptional athlete that happens to be an exceptional player,” FSU head coach Mark Krikorian said. “Some people get fooled into thinking that she’s just a fast player up front, there’s so many more dimensions to the game than that. She’s become very, very good at holding the ball, connecting to her teammates, slipping balls through to her teammates. She’s become dangerous on different types of set pieces as well.”

One of the keys to Williams’ transition to Florida State was captain Dagny Brynjarsdottir, who lines up just behind her in the attacking midfield spot. The Icelandic international’s leadership and initiative helped Williams with her adjustement.

“On and off the field she’s been a huge influence on me,” Williams said. “Coming in and talking to Mark about what I was looking for in a program and things like that, and for him to talk so highly on the level of professionalism that the team had and to have a captain like Dagny to look up and see that he really was serious when he said this is how things are happening, it’s just really awesome to play beside her, for her to teach me different things on and off the field.”

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Moving from a program like Vanderbilt, a mid-tier team in the SEC, to one such as Florida State that is chasing national titles on a regular basis was a challenge Williams embraced. Krikorian was up front to her about the high standards and expectations of FSU Soccer.

On the eve of her first appearance in a national title game, Williams is just going with the flow and following the lead of her teammates who’ve been there before.

“It helps having a lot of experienced girls and having been to the College Cup, having played in a final, so it takes a little of the edge off,” she said. “[I] just follow the crowd and go off their momentum.”

Krikorian hopes to see an electric conclusion on Sunday afternoon to what has been an extremely successful switch for player and program alike.

“There’s a lot of different dimensions to her game, and she showed that [on Friday] and I’m hoping she’ll be able to do that [Sunday],” he said.