Keith Cardona
A hush fell over a hostile Ludwig Field crowd as North Carolina forward Rob Lovejoy set the ball on the penalty spot in the 89th minute. With a low fog rolling across the turf, Terrapins men’s soccer goalkeeper Keith Cardona took his mark on the waterlogged end line.
A goal would end the Terps’ 13-game unbeaten streak. It would unseat the nation’s No. 1 team and give the Tar Heels control of the ACC.
On the sideline, coach Sasho Cirovski watched his sophomore goalkeeper face the biggest moment of his time in College Park so far.
In the Ludwig Field stands, Keith’s father, Matthew Cardona, saw a potentially career-defining sequence unfold in what felt like slow motion.
And 230 miles north of College Park, a red-clad Pamela Cardona stood in front of the TV and hoped luck rested with her only son.
Keith Cardona guessed the ball would sail to his right. It did. He then saved midfielder Verneri Valimaa’s follow-up shot, forcing overtime in the Terps’ eventual 1-0 win.
It was a seminal moment, Cirovski said. After an up-and-down nine months, Cardona had proven his worth. He had established himself as a playmaker on one of college soccer’s biggest stages.
But for Cardona, the save meant even more. It marked his comeback from the brink.
“It definitely was a point of ownership,” said Cardona, who will man the net tomorrow when the Terps host No. 10-seed Louisville in the NCAA tournament quarterfinals. “[It was] a point of putting my stamp on that game and my stamp on the program to be this team’s backbone.”
“He’s coming of age,” Cirovski told a throng of media members after the North Carolina game. “The man is coming of age.”
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Late last season, with the Terps stumbling into the NCAA tournament winless in their final four games, Cirovski opted to start Cardona over incumbent starter Will Swaim for their second-round matchup with West Virginia.
Cardona had made just two starts prior to that November night, both of which came against lesser-known programs Adelphi and Seton Hall. Swaim, meanwhile, was a redshirt senior who seemed to have a stranglehold on the job. But Cirovski felt the Terps needed a change, so he bucked conventional wisdom and threw Cardona into the fire.
“It was great,” Cardona said in early October. “It’s a notch on my belt. Things didn’t turn out [the way we wanted], but I can say I got those games. At the time, I thought I’d earned them.”
Cardona’s NCAA tournament debut was a success. In his third career start, he needed only one save to shut out the Mountaineers, 4-0. It was the first shutout for the team in more than a month — their last one coming when Cardona blanked Adelphi.
But it all came crashing down the next weekend. Louisville defeated the Terps, 4-2, at Ludwig Field in the third round and ended a season that was seemingly charmed after one of the best starts in program history. For the third straight year, Cirovski’s squad would have to watch the College Cup from home.
There was reason for optimism, though. The Terps would return key upperclassmen such as defenders Taylor Kemp and London Woodberry, midfielder John Stertzer and forward Patrick Mullins. And Cardona, after getting his feet wet in big games, would return too.
Despite Cardona’s vital postseason experience, there was still plenty of room for improvement.
“I didn’t have a grasp on what I needed to do yet,” Cardona said.
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When Pamela Cardona heard Keith had lost his grip on the starting job this spring, she felt like any parent would: shocked, disappointed and distressed.
“It was heart-wrenching,” she said. “It was frustrating. We were quite upset, to put it mildly. It was very, very hard because parents can see things sometimes that the kids can’t, and they don’t want to hear it from us. He had to figure it out for himself. We felt a little bit helpless. As much as we tried to knock some sense into him, I think it’s something he had to figure out himself.”
He’d let himself slip, Keith Cardona said. He struggled in the classroom. His decision-making was shaky. And his on-field performance suffered, paving the way for a three-way battle with redshirt freshman Jordan Tatum and freshman Cody Niedermeier.
Matthew Cardona didn’t know what to do. Sure, he’d experienced his share of life-changing decisions — he left Michigan State after two years of studying veterinary science to become a hairdresser and open a salon in 1978 — but watching his son make his own was completely different. He wanted to tell Keith what to do, but he couldn’t.
“You can’t always be there for them,” Matthew Cardona said. “You want to. If you’re going to let your kid grow up and become the man or woman that he or she wants to be, you have to step back and take the safety net away.”
Entering the summer, Keith Cardona was at a crossroads. He could make the changes he needed to make, or he could sacrifice everything he’d built.
“It was all or nothing,” Pamela Cardona said. “He finally figured out that he would lose everything if he didn’t put his pedal to the metal and figure out all parts of being a Terrapin.”
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The three-way goalkeeping battle wasn’t a new position for Keith Cardona. He’d never been “the man” at any of his stops in his career.
He was buried on the bench when he started high school at perennial contender St. Benedict’s Prep in Newark, N.J.
When he spent the first semester of his junior year at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., in residency with the under-17 national team, he was listed behind future UCLA goalkeeper Earl Edwards on the depth chart.
And when he returned from the national team to spend his final year-and-a-half at Glen Rock High School, a torn labrum derailed his senior season. If it wasn’t for the exposure the New York Red Bulls developmental academy afforded him, he likely wouldn’t have been a nationally touted recruit.
“We knew he was good,” Pamela Cardona said. “But he didn’t always get the chance to play, either because he had good goalies in front of him or because he was coming off of injury. He had to fight every inch of the way to get between the goalposts and not give up his will to do it.”
Keith Cardona was competing with Tatum, his best friend and one of Virginia’s top high school keepers, and Niedermeier, the No. 4 goalkeeper in the class of 2012. The inconsistent Cardona had no guarantee he’d start come fall.
“Again, he had to fight his way back and get his head where it should be,” Pamela Cardona said. “It was another one of these instances where Keith is not guaranteed the starting spot just because he’s Keith. Keith has to fight for it.”
Something clicked for Cardona in the summer. The light came on, Cirovski said, and Cardona reverted to the form that earned him those crucial starts late last fall.
All three goalkeepers played in the Terps’ first exhibition game at Creighton in August. A few days later against Penn State, only Tatum and Cardona saw time. And when the Terps took the field Aug. 26 in their season opener against Louisville, Cardona manned the goalposts in a 3-0 victory.
“It was good for him,” Kemp said. “He’s had to persevere and show some mental toughness in that he had to come back and re-earn his spot. It wasn’t a given for him. I think now it’s done nothing but help him.”
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Cardona hasn’t relinquished the starting job this season. It hasn’t always been smooth, like when Clemson scored two second-half goals to snap the Terps’ 13-game winning streak Oct. 27 or when Wake Forest scored four goals to hand the Terps their first loss of the season Nov. 1.
His value can’t solely be measured in statistics, though. He ranks fifth in the ACC in goals against average (1.02), fifth in shutouts (six) and ninth in save percentage (.655). But Cardona came through when it mattered most — the penalty kick against North Carolina, a late Clemson push in the ACC tournament semifinals, the ACC championship game against the Tar Heels.
“It’s what we need from our goalkeepers,” Cirovski said. “We’re a team that attacks, and we’re going to need our keeper to come up with a save or two in a game to give us a chance to win.”
With the Terps one win from the College Cup and a rematch looming with the team that ended their title aspirations last year, Cardona took a moment Wednesday to reflect on the past year in College Park. It’s been a long time, Cardona said, and things are different.
“I’ve definitely grown a lot, and I’ve changed my mentality to just every day what I need to do and to better myself and better the team,” Cardona said. “I’ve definitely bought into this program so much more over the past year than what I thought I would coming in here.”
He shuffled up and down the Terps’ depth chart. He lost his job and had to win it back, all the while realizing that the learning experience would eventually stretch beyond the boundaries of Ludwig Field.
“I think the biggest lesson Keith had to learn was how intensely devoted he had to be to the game in every aspect,” Matthew Cardona said. “He had to grow up over the past year and learn that there was nothing else that could take soccer’s place. And yet, if he didn’t do his best in the other areas of life, in his other endeavors, then soccer wouldn’t matter.”
And Keith Cardona knows it’s still not over yet.
“Nothing’s given here, in life or anywhere,” Cardona said. “You have to take it, and you have to keep it. Even once you’ve taken it, it’s still up for grabs. It’s not yours forever.”
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