Jennifer Rockwood remembers circling a season on her calendar.
The BYU soccer coach was ushering another class of freshmen into her program and she thought that could be the group — the last one. She would see them through to graduation and then retire.
The season she circled? That would’ve been 2012.
“But then something keeps pulling me back,” Rockwood said this week.
The years have stacked up since then, a decade passed, but something always seems to pull Rockwood back to the same place — a place only she has occupied, the first and only coach in BYU women’s soccer history.
She’s been in Provo for 28 seasons now. In that time, she’s rattled off 22 NCAA tournament appearances, five Sweet 16s and one national championship game. And on Friday, Rockwood was set to embark on a 23rd tournament run with a group looking to make back-to-back College Cup appearances for the first time in program history.
The program has never been healthier, and the architect of it all still wants to be in charge.
“I’ve never wanted to coach anywhere besides BYU,” Rockwood said. “So you know, for me, it’s just getting motivated to go through the grind of recruiting and coaching and the ups and downs. I love competing. I love to win. And I think it’s mostly just the interaction that you get with your players and the chance to be a part of their lives for a short time.”
Rockwood spends a week, sometimes more, after every season evaluating her future. She tries to look at it in a year, or two-year increments and move on from there.
And although she has decided to return every time, the topics weighing on her have changed through the years.
Until a couple of years ago, she feared that she had reached her ceiling at BYU. The Cougars made it to the doorstep of the College Cup five times, but couldn’t break through. A typical separator in coaching legacies is making the final four.
“I actually kind of reconciled with the fact that, you know, maybe it’s not gonna happen and I still had a very successful career and the program’s done really well,” she said.
But in 2020, belief started to change. Santa Clara, a fellow West Coast Conference member, won the national title. Rockwood thought BYU could make a similar run.
The next year, in 2021, BYU went to the national title game and was a penalty kick away from winning. It was a game that plugged a major hole in Rockwood’s resume and breathed new hope into the coach and program.
“I do think [winning a national title] is a reality,” Rockwood said, noting that she always thought it was possible, but now it is tangible.
Other years, though, she’s worried about handling the stress of recruiting and the challenges of working with a new roster.
In women’s college soccer, there is no recruiting calendar or windows. It means coaches are either always recruiting or getting left behind. That part, Rockwood admits, wears on her like most other coaches. In recent years, she has gotten more help from her coaching staff in picking up the load, and more support could be on the way with the Big 12.
“I don’t care for it. The travel is hard,” Rockwood said. “In our sport, on any weekend anywhere in the country any time of the year, there’s soccer being played somewhere. So that’s a grind. I have more help now with my staff than I’ve ever had. And so I rely on them for traveling and I rely more on them for recruiting than I have in the past. I have a lot of trust in them.”
And it brings her to the final part of the job, the part she says she loves but is also a challenge. Once the roster is in place, it essentially becomes a four-month grind in practice to tweak the roster to get a winner.
This season has been a prime example of it. BYU returned seven starters from a College Cup team in 2021, but lost two All-Americans and key goal scorers.
With a gantlet of a nonconference schedule, Rockwood spent most of the time adjusting formations and player positions. BYU started 3-3-1.
But then Rockwood moved Jamie Shepherd from forward back to midfield. Olivia Wade was moved from the midfield to the forward.
On the backline, Rockwood moved Laveni Vaka to center back to anchor a young defense. She ended up in the same formation she used last year, but using centerbacks to initiate offense and her forwards to play more defense.
It has worked to the tune of 11 straight matches without a loss and a first-round game against Utah Valley.
“There’s a fine line between frustration and enjoying the process right?” Rockwood said. “And we always talk about the journey.”
Right now, Rockwood feels good about where she is at in this journey as her team tries to make another run. Ahead of Friday’s match, she saw no reason why her 10-2-6 team couldn’t go back to the College Cup. It would likely require matchups with Stanford and North Carolina if she is to do it.
But either way, Rockwood said the allure of joining Big 12 Conference next year is already pulling her back once more.
“I’ve been doing it a long time, longer than most,” she finished. “And so as long as we’re winning and things are going well I’ll probably keep trying to give it a go.”
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