Gathered at Fatty’s Pub & Grille Monday, NIU men’s soccer watched the NCAA tournament selection show with anticipation as to who it would draw as its first round opponent.

To their excitement, the Huskies (14-5-0) drew Western Illinois in the first round. NIU will host the Fighting Leathernecks at the NIU soccer complex Thursday.

“We’re definitely excited to host,” said Eric Luzzi, NIU head men’s soccer coach. “It’s a great honor for the program to host the first round game. It’s going to be a good game. I know coach Johnson at Western very well. He’s a very good coach. He has those guys rolling. They’ve won 13 games this year. It’s going to be a heck of a battle for sure.”

NIU went 4-1 on its own turf this season.

“In recent years, we haven’t really had a great home record,” said NIU senior Francis Otira. “But this year, at the beginning of the year, we decided that we wanted to set that right and make our place somewhere tough to come by. And right now we are 4-1 at home, which is pretty stellar, and I think the boys will want to protect our home field, for sure.”

The Huskies and Fighting Leathernecks both earned an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament by winning their conference tournaments.

This is only the third time in school history that the Huskies have made the NCAA tournament and the first since 2006, when the Huskies defeated Loyola at home, 1-0, and lost at Indiana, 1-0, in the second round.

If NIU defeats Western Illinois (13-6-1), it would move on to play the No. 2 seed, Creighton.

“That’s what you want – to test yourself at Creighton,” Otira said. “They’re up there as the best college team right now, so being in the bracket with them is an opportunity, which we have if we win the first game to play them, obviously, so it’s exciting.”

The Huskies are excited to be where they are right now, but they don’t want to get ahead of themselves quite yet.

“I think at this point, we should be looking to do all the same things we’ve been doing,” Luzzi said. “Take things one game at a time, come out every single day, focus on the process, focus on the things that we can control, focus on working hard for each other, playing our system, playing our style … all the things that have gotten us to this point. And if we do that, we’ll see where this thing takes us.”