The Beavers found a new home in the West Coast Conference and in early June coach Lauren Sinacola announced her resignation.

It’s been about a month since Caroline Kelly was announced as interim coach. Kelly, who has been an assistant coach for the Beavers since 2021, happily stepped into the role.

This time of year the football schedule is always busier and there has been no time to think about anything other than preparing the personnel and getting the team on track.

“It was a lot of fun,” Kelly said. “It was a project to get the staff in and get everyone settled in, but it was a lot of fun. I think it helps that I was here, so I knew the institutional people I needed to talk to to make sure everything was organized. That definitely helped, and this Oregon State athletic department community was very helpful and supportive until we got the staff in place, and now we’re ready to go, which is really helpful.”

Kelly played at Virginia Tech and then one season as a transfer at South Carolina.

She was a graduate assistant at South Carolina before moving to Dartmouth as an assistant coach for the 2017 season. She then went to Army for two seasons and to Cincinnati in 2020.

She accepted the job at OSU in 2021 “seen unseen.”

“But I fell in love with it. I fell in love with Oregon State and the community and the sports in Beaver,” Kelly said. “It reminds me of the school I went to, it reminds me of the working class work ethic of grinding through to get something done.”

When Kelly was offered the position of interim coach, she didn’t hesitate.

“My goal, and ideally the department’s goal, is that we have a great and successful season and we want to provide some stability to this program and these women,” she said. “Yes, it’s the title that it is, but I just coach like any normal head coach.”

There is still a full season ahead of us, but Kelly answered with a resounding yes when asked if she would like to continue as head coach.

“Absolutely, yes. If it works out, that is definitely the goal that after this season I can step down as interim and become head coach of this program, yes,” she said.

Oregon State no longer has to compete against 10 other teams in the Pacific-12 Conference.

For most of the school’s programs, this meant joining the WCC for a time. While some may not see the benefits of such a move, it is a solid outlet for the women’s soccer program.

The WCC enjoys an excellent reputation in this sport and can confirm its successes at national level.

Santa Clara won a national title in 2020 and 2001. The University of Portland won titles in 2002 (defeating Santa Clara in the championship game) and 2005. Portland also finished runner-up in 1995.

“This is clearly the best outcome for the Oregon State women’s soccer team, to land in the WCC,” Kelly said. “A lot of our players can stay local. They can still play in front of their parents and families that we recruited them from. I think they wanted to play competitive soccer on the West Coast and that’s why they chose the Pac-12. So the WCC is a reflection of that and that’s great for us. And I think you can see that — we haven’t had anyone transfer.”

Junior defender Megin Turi said the Beavers see the move to WCC as a great opportunity that could bring the team a lot of success.

“Obviously the Pac-12 has been a really good conference, but in the West Coast Conference we’re going to have an opportunity to play against some really good schools and I think we’re going to be competitive with those schools as well,” Turi said. “In the Pac-12 we’ve had ups and downs with some of the teams we’ve played against, but all of us on the team are pretty confident right now because we practiced really, really hard in the spring and we’ve played against a few people in the West Coast Conference before and had success. So I think we’ll be able to play against some good people in the preseason and we’ll look really good once we get into the conference.”

Turi said Kelly keeps the team together very well and is willing to listen to the players when they have an opinion or question.

Kelly has also given the players confidence. She talks about winning the West Coast Conference and making the NCAA tournament.

“I think she says that every day and reminds us that that’s her goal, that she’s confident, and that gives us even more confidence. I think she’s really good at showing confidence in us,” Turi said.

“She’s just someone you can laugh with and laugh at, and she laughs at us. There’s never a weird tension. We can trust her and we can definitely see that trust back, which I think is so important in a head coach. Since she’s been head coach, she’s really shown us that. She’s just a great woman to be around and definitely an inspiration to us as players.”

Turi is back, along with striker McKenna Martinez, striker/midfielder Ava Benedetti, defender Amaya Bautista and goalkeeper Mya Sanchez, to name a few.

The plan is to increase the tempo and score goals on offense and then play disruptive defense.

“I think applying pressure and going forward are our two strengths,” Kelly said. “The ball will be on the ground, we’re not just going to bomb it, we’re going to play it through our midfield, we’re going to change the point of attack, we’re going to go out there and really make people think about how to defend us and then also get frustrated when we defend them.”

When preparing for the start of the season, the team’s main focus was to get the ball into the goal as quickly as possible.

The Beavers open the season on August 15 against Iowa in Missoula, Montana, before facing Montana on August 18.

“Even in practice, she’s been putting time stamps on how fast we can score a goal, and I think that makes us play the game more realistically, so in a real game we can say, OK, in the last 30 seconds of the game we can score a goal. And I think that’s really instilled a game mentality in us. We want to score goals, we want more of those celebrations like we had last season when we played Oregon,” Turi said. “I think everyone feels like we’re going to score a lot of goals this season.”