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When the ball hit the back of the net, Cloe Chase didn’t react with joy.
Instead, another emotion surged through her.
Relief.
The junior striker spread her arms wide and tipped her head to the sky. She sighed and smiled widely, joining her teammates to celebrate the third goal of a 3-0 win over San Francisco on Aug. 23.
“I was ecstatic, but I didn’t really know what to do,” Chase said, laughing. For the Marist graduate, the score — the first of her college career — was a long time coming.
So is the arrival of Oregon women’s soccer.
The Ducks are off to their best start (6-1-1) in five years, went undefeated in nonconference play (5-0-1) for just the second time in 45 years, and have already scored more goals (18) than all of last season (15). After splitting games in the opening weekend of Big Ten play — a 1-0 loss to Rutgers and a 1-0 win over Maryland — Oregon travels to USC Friday evening, Sept. 18, where the Trojans (1-5-2) host the Ducks for senior day.
It’s been an especially satisfying season for Chase, a Eugene local who always considered Oregon her dream destination. Though she committed to the previous coaching staff, when the Ducks hired Tracy Joyner in December 2024, she decided to stick around, because playing in front of family is tough to beat. But she was also intrigued, and buoyed, by Joyner’s bold proclamation in her introductory team meeting.
“Oregon can win a national championship,” Joyner told the young women gathered around her. Chase’s eyes went wide. The Ducks were coming off a mostly miserable 5-11-2 season, and now the new coach was talking about competing for national titles?
“The first time meeting Tracy, we were intimidated, because you always are with a new coach,” Chase recalled. “She comes in, and she’s talking big — but it was really empowering. She raised the ceiling, told us the only people putting limits on us are ourselves, said if we start thinking big right now we can do big things right away — and it’s true!”
Chase, who was coming off a 2025 campaign that ended early due to injury, knew instantly she wanted to stay to “leave my mark, and change the narrative around this program.”
Carly Cormack, a junior midfielder from Honolulu, felt the same.
“She had so much belief in us and the ability to win here; it was contagious,” Cormack said of Joyner. “Just sitting there listening to her in that first meeting, my heart was racing, my blood was pumping, I was ready to go. She instantly raised the standard for this team and this program. The energy was crazy.”
Oregon is Joyner’s fourth rebuilding job, after previous stops at Santa Rosa Junior College, Division II San Francisco State and UC Davis, where she coached for five years. A former all-conference defender at Cal from 2002-05, Joyner always felt a pull to Oregon.
“When I was playing in the old Pac-10, this was always my favorite trip,” said Joyner, whose husband, Justin Joyner, also is a head coach, in his first year leading the Oregon State men’s basketball program. “There was just something about Eugene. We were usually up here at the end of October; it was always so pretty. We stayed at the Valley River Inn right on the water; there was a little crispness in the air. It just always felt like soccer. And then, of course, you look at the University of Oregon from the outside, from an athletic standpoint, it’s just this powerhouse, with so many championship programs … it had this allure.”
But the soccer program had no real winning tradition, save for a brief spate in the early 1980s. The university dropped the program after the 1981 season due to budget cuts, bringing it back in 1996. Since its revival, the Ducks are 199-307-74, and they’ve never been to the NCAA women’s soccer tournament. Joyner believes she can change that.
Years ago, she identified Oregon as a dream job. If she wanted a shot at it, “I knew I had to do whatever I could to put myself in the mix,” she said. “That meant I had to prove I know how to take over a poorly performing program and turn it around. And now, I have the blueprint for that.”
The data backs her up. Joyner led Santa Rosa to a conference title, SF State to its conference tournament semis, and took UC Davis from Big West cellar-dweller to three straight regular-season conference title runner-up finishes, as well as three straight semifinal appearances in the Big West tournament. The day after UC Davis was knocked out of its 2024 tournament, the Ducks called.
“There were certainly times in my career where I felt jealous of other coaches who had bigger jobs before me,” Joyner said. “I’d get really envious and think, ‘Well, if I had just gone and been an assistant at some big Power Four school, I’d have gotten the Oregon job six years earlier.’
“But now I reflect back and realize each step of my journey was exactly what I needed. I was in the trenches learning. I didn’t have some ‘copy and paste’ system that I’d learned from being an assistant at a big, successful program — I had to figure it out each place I went. And while I’ve always believed, everywhere I’ve been, that we could win a national championship, now I have the tools to do it.”
It helps to have buy-in from players like Chase and Cormack, the only two left from a class that originally boasted nine. And it’s especially gratifying for those two to have success, even if it’s a slow climb. Oregon won just three games last year, Joyner’s first, but capped the season with a 2-1 upset over No. 8 Washington, the only conference loss for the Big Ten-champion Huskies. They’re looking for more wins like that this season.
The team has other goals, too. One of Chase’s: Getting to a point where soccer is so popular on campus, the Duck store has to sell team jerseys. She also imagines a day when student fans pile into cars and buses and get to the stadium early to fight for the best seats at soccer games, a routine currently reserved only for football and hoops.
That type of commitment and fanfare would mean a lot to a local standout who saw a downtrodden program for three decades and still decided she wanted to be here.
Chase loves playing so close to family. She sees her parents at every home game, frequently stops by for dinner and leftovers — “I have no shame,” she deadpans — especially if her mom has some of her famous meatballs in the fridge. She likes helping new players adjust to Eugene because “homesickness is a very real thing,” she said. Oregon brought in 11 freshmen and seven transfers before the 2026 season, a necessity in an era of constant roster building driven by NIL and instant eligibility with the transfer portal. And she’s excited that being anchored here means she’ll be able to watch the rise of Oregon soccer, even as it continues after she graduates.
“For Cloe to stick around, to believe in me and my vision, she has been a great advocate for our program,” Joyner said. “She has really been carrying the weight of a Power Four program that hasn’t had a lot of success, and she’s done it with a lot of grace. And she’s willing to put in the work to change things.”
She is — because she keeps thinking about a seed Joyner planted in her head.
“There’s not a lot of tradition with this program,” Joyner told her players at their first meeting. “Who wants to get inducted into the university’s Hall of Fame? Who wants to be part of the team that makes the NCAA Tournament for the first time ever?”
Chase does. She’s hoping to score a few more goals along the way, too.
