Four seasons ago, DePauw men's soccer sat in 8th place in the North Coast Athletic Conference standings. Three seasons later, head coach Steven McCarthy has added three trophies and two NCAA Division III postseason appearances to the program's record books. If you asked anyone outside the program, they would've told you it was a shocking turnaround, but to McCarthy, that wasn't the case.
The season before McCarthy took over, the Tigers finished with a 6-7-5 (1-5-2 NCAC) record. "That was just a blip on the radar," McCarthy said. When he took over, he wanted to, "reinvigorate the success of the past and remind guys first and foremost where they're playing." To say he did that would be an understatement. The Tigers made a modest step forward in his first season finishing 7-7-4 (3-2-3) and made an appearance in the first round of the NCAC Tournament.
In his second season, the team caught fire, going 10-5-6 (3-2-3). They once again made an appearance in the NCAC Tournament, but this time they got hot at the right time. They needed extra time to defeat top-seeded Ohio Wesleyan and needed penalties to defeat second-seeded Denison. The Tigers fought their way into the NCAA Championship that season.
The 2025 season felt like the culmination of hard work and good culture, "it just feels like everybody is on the same agenda," said junior Joey Vehovsky. DePauw went 12-2-5 (5-0-3 NCAC) and undefeated in conference play. They earned the top seed in the NCAC Tournament and defeated Kenyon 3-2 before beating Denison 3-1 for the championship. It was the first time DePauw had been NCAC regular season champions and the fourth time they had earned the conference's automatic qualifier into the NCAA.
If there was only one thing to point at for the program's recent success, it would be that McCarthy is a winner. "He's driven. I don't think I've ever had a coach that wants to win as much as he does," said Vehovsky. His players also described him as, "passionate and intense." Before his time at DePauw, McCarthy was a winner at Loras College, winning an American Rivers Conference Championship and making it to the NCAA second round.
In his time at Loras, he learned what his players have called, "the standard." It's a high expectation that McCarthy has for all his players, both on the field and off the field, "it's not just on the field, but with academics and the way we operate when we're on away trips," said Vehovsky. The attention to detail has been one of the keys to DePauw's rise to the national scene.
The first place "the standard" shows up is in his team leadership. "There are some natural tendencies of leaders," McCarthy said. The team is led by four players, Captains Sam Ortner and Sebastian Leon, along with Vice Captains AJ Hockstok and Joey Vehovsky. These four players had big shoes to fill, "I lost a lot of leadership from last year," McCarthy said. These four players filled the gap in leadership in spades. Leon, Ortner and Hockstok played with a fire on the field and weren't afraid to point out when guys weren't meeting the standard. Vehovsky was sidelined by an injury all season, but was always one of the first players on the field and the first guy to congratulate a teammate on the sideline. Vehovsky spoke about the lessons he learned being a leader from the sideline this year, saying he's focused a lot more on choosing his words, "I kind of realized if I was talking too much, I was just gonna be drowned out. It was just noise to the rest of the players… my words had weight to them, and I finally know how to implement that in the right situations."
Much like the team had to go through some growing pains with new faces wearing the captain's band, Vehovsky had to do the same with his own leadership. These captains weren't thrust into the spotlight; however, it was something that had been building since the end of last season. "That's something we've been working on building throughout the spring and the whole preseason, so it really came together towards the end of the year," said Ortner. "We did some work as the leadership group outside of practice, trying to learn from Coach McCarthy and just talking to past leaders on the team as well,trying to learn the best way to lead," said Hockstok, who was one of the team's key on-the-field leaders and contributors. It was this focus on leadership that gave DePauw the edge in mentally tough games like their regular season matchup versus Denison.
The culture inside the program has been great, but McCarthy would be the first to tell you that isn't everything. "You can have a great culture, but if you don't have good enough players, you're not going to win and vice versa," he said when asked whether culture or talent was more important this year. Fortunately for McCarthy, he had both. Six DePauw players made the all-NCAC teams, and three of them, Sam Ortner, Braden Murphey and Harrison Engel, were first-teamers. Two of those three are from his "supersonic" junior class that he recruited throughout his first spring in Greencastle. "I'm going to be forever indebted to every single one of them," McCarthy said when speaking about the Junior class, who came to DePauw on his pitch of winning championships without having any proof yet to back it up.
It's not just the juniors who are contributing to the squad; the Tigers featured all four seniors starting this season, along with a laundry list of sophomores and the occasional freshman. Whether or not certain players are seeing a lot of in-game time, they still contribute to the team. "There's just competition within each position, and with that competition, it pushes every single player. You get better every single day," said Hockstok. The fans see Julian Bell's opening goal a few minutes into the NCAC tournament, but what they don't see is the work that the players behind him have put in to push him to develop the skills he showed on that goal.
It wasn't just the change in the talent level of the players that brought DePauw to where they are today. "He understands what it takes to win at the Division 3 level. It's different than what you might see at Barcelona or Real Madrid because we aren't them," said Ortner. The team adapted new play styles under McCarthy, and it was these new styles and the added talent that helped push DePauw over the edge. In the past, Depauw, "played out from the back almost to a fault, now we've gone to a more build-up style offense," said Hockstok. Part of this stylistic change has come from the talent on the field, but most of it comes from the mind on the bench.
Looking ahead to next season and beyond, McCarthy's plan remains the same. "In our program, we compete for championships. It will always be the same and it's been the same since I got here," he said when asked about the standard for the team moving forward. It's the same message he gave the athletic department when they hired him and the same thing he tells recruits. So far, that message has been proven to be true in massive dividends. The Tigers have won the last two NCAC tournaments and are pushing to break through in the NCAA Tournament. McCarthy plans to maintain the same attention to detail that led to the recent success, saying, "You're gonna have some really good years. You're gonna have some really bad years," and there are few conferences where that holds more true than the NCAC. Through the culture that McCarthy has built and the talent he has brought in, DePauw men's soccer isn't an underdog anymore; they're here to win it all.
