The Northern Star’s Ed Rietveld talked with NIU’s first year women’s soccer coach John Ross. Coach Ross discusses what interested him about the NIU job and what type of team he wants his teams to be and a whole lot more.

NS: What interested you about the NIU job that made you want to come to DeKalb?

JR: One was the location, coming back home and having familiarity with the program and the area. Another thing was just seeing all the changes at NIU over the last 10 years and knowing that this can be a real powerful athletic program here and I wanted to be a part of that.

NS: What is your overall coaching philosophy? Are your teams more defensively oriented or offensively oriented?

JR: I think they’re both. I think part of our philosophy is to be organized and to play together as a team and each game try and increase our abilities defensively and offensively at the same time and stay inside the team organization and then from there keep building and adding.

NS: Given that the program won two games a season ago, what would be a successful first season?

JS: I think a successful season is to make sure we compete in every game and that we get better every day. And then from there at the end of the season we’ll look back at what we accomplished. I think it’s that old cliché that you got it take one day at a time and push yourself as hard as you can that day.

NS: What made you want to become a head coach?

JR: It’s kind of a natural progression from playing to getting into coaching. Looking for new challenges all the time and just wanting to have an opportunity to have your own program and instill their own values into the kids and really help them succeed in life.