After an exhilarating MIAC championship win in a penalty shootout over Augsburg, the St. Thomas women’s soccer team earned an automatic bid into the 2019 Division III NCAA tournament.

The Tommies hosted the first round, defeating both Monmouth College and Illinois Wesleyan University 1-0 each last weekend at South Field. With back-to-back wins in the opening weekend of the tournament, the Tommies advance to the Sweet 16 – the first St. Thomas women’s team to do so since 2002.

The No.19 Tommies next test lies on the outskirts of Chicago, where they travel to Wheaton College to take on the No. 6 Thunder.

The Tommies (17-2-3) are looking forward to playing the Thunder (18-1-2), a team coach Sheila McGill calls “one of the best programs in the nation.”

“We really looked at (the bracket) and thought, ‘This is our opportunity this year,’ we maybe don’t have the same big players as last season, but we play more as an entire team this year,” McGill said.

The Thunder have a 6-1 advantage in their seven meetings with the Tommies.

“We played them last year, and to be honest, when we played them, it was our first game of the season. We were a bit nervous on the road and we were trying a new formation, but now we know them,” McGill said. “We’ve played similar opponents this season and against nationally ranked ones there’s a lot of the exact same results, we have a really good mentality going into this.”

McGill highlighted the enthusiasm and excitement levels of the team as anticipation builds ahead of Friday’s game.

The Thunder are coming off of a 3-0 thrashing over Webster University and a narrow 1-0 victory over The College of Wooster in the first two games of the tournament.

The Thunder’s only loss this season came against the Washington University in St. Louis on Sept. 18, a team that St. Thomas defeated 1-0 in double overtime 11 days earlier.

“That was a really crazy game for us [against Wash-U], we had a lot of players with injuries prior and we had a lot go down in the game too. By the end of it, we only had 3 starters in the game with 1 in their natural position,” Wheaton head coach Pete Fiske said. “Overall, we were really happy with that result due to the way things went.”

Fiske is looking forward to playing a team like St. Thomas, who he says is “entirely different” from their last meeting in 2018. He sees the match as an opportunity for Wheaton to test themselves against a “quality” St. Thomas side.

“I see a team that’s a lot like ours,” Fiske said. “They play a fairly similar formation. They have a strong attack and good goaltending.”

The winner between St. Thomas and Wheaton will play Saturday evening at 5 p.m. against the winner of No. 15 Carnegie Mellon University and No. 17 Ohio Northern University.

Jacob Schneider can be reached at schn6923@stthomas.edu.