No. 4 Stanford soccer team poised to contend for national title

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Boasting possibly the best player in the country, the Stanford Cardinal haven’t lost since the season opener and hope to win a national championship.

But this isn’t football. It’s Stanford’s No. 4-ranked men’s soccer team, one of the most relentless in the country.

The Cardinal (13-1-2, 6-0-2 Pac-12) clinched at least a share of their second straight league title by beating Oregon State 2-0 Friday night. They could set a school record for league victories if they win at Washington on Monday night.

Are they potentially national champions? “Most definitely we’re good enough,” fourth-year head coach Jeremy Gunn said. “We’ve seen teams with less ability and less talent get to that stage. But, of course, there’s so much to go with that.

“In other sports, if you execute, that usually translates to points. In soccer, you can execute in every category but goal-scoring sometimes and you lose.”

He likens games to boxing matches. He thought Stanford was ahead of Washington, 7 rounds to 3, last month. The Huskies, thanks mainly to red-hot goalkeeper Ryan Herman, played the Cardinal to a scoreless tie. Gunn thought UCLA had a 6-4 rounds advantage over his team in a recent 2-2 tie.

Those have been the only hiccups on the Stanford record since an opening 1-0 loss at UC Santa Barbara. The Cardinal are trying to erase the memory of a 1-0 loss to UC Irvine in the second round of last year’s NCAA tournament. They went into that game ranked No. 1 in the country.

“That was huge motivation for us in the offseason,” All-America defender Brandon Vincent said. “We want to make sure we make the best run possible this year.”

Stanford’s Jordan Morris (right) has a team-best eight goals and two assists though he missed four games this season. Stanford’s Jordan Morris (right) has a team-best eight goals and two assists though he missed four games this season. Photo: David Bernal Photo: David Bernal Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close No. 4 Stanford soccer team poised to contend for national title 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Jordan Morris, the Cardinal’s jet-propelled forward and Hermann Trophy candidate, has a team-leading eight goals and two assists even though he missed four games because of commitments to U.S. Soccer.

He might miss the regular-season finale against Cal on Nov. 12 if national-team coach Jurgen Klinsmann calls him up for a match against St. Vincent and the Grenadines and another against Trinidad and Tobago.

There’s plenty of firepower on the team besides Morris. Eight other players have scored goals. Forward Foster Langsdorf has six goals, and Stanford has an exciting freshman forward in Amir Bashti (Monta Vista-Cupertino). Outside midfielders Eric Verso (10 assists) and Corey Baird (seven assists) are the setup men. Gunn calls central midfielders Ty Thompson and Slater Meehan “the engine room of the team.”

Vincent, who has converted all four of the team’s penalty kicks, said, “For the outside backs, we can be a secondary wave of attack. We put more numbers in the attacking third” of the field.

The Cardinal tend to dominate opponents not only with skill but also with superior fitness. Their motto is to “work hard and smart,” according to Gunn, a 44-year-old Englishman who learned the value of hard practices when he played at Cal State Bakersfield under Simon Tobin, now coach at San Jose State.

“It was 110 degrees and really bad air quality in Bakersfield,” Gunn said. “He really taught the ethic of hard work.”

Gunn served as an assistant coach at his alma mater and later built national contenders at Fort Lewis College (Division II) and Charlotte, which reached the NCAA final in 2011 before losing to North Carolina.

He was already on Stanford’s radar before that game. Associate athletic director Earl Koberlein was impressed that Gunn was able to build winning teams without blue-chip athletes.

“The thing I heard over and over was his teams were so fit, so dedicated, so committed, that you didn’t want to play them,” Koberlein said.

Thompson, whose brother Tommy plays for the Earthquakes, says there’s a method to the practice regimen: “It’s not just running laps and laps. It’s doing very game-applicable, short, sharp movements.”

Stanford has not won a men’s national championship in soccer although it reached the final in 1998 under coach Bobby Clark and 2002 under Bret Simon, Gunn’s predecessor.

In a given year, there aren’t many high school seniors who have the academic resume to get into Stanford and the ability to “make a difference” on the soccer field, Gunn said. In fact, it’s “probably between five and 10 guys, maybe 20 in the country.”

On the other hand, he said, “When people are good enough to be accepted here, it means more often than not you’re going to be getting somebody who’s inherently competitive and wonderfully driven as a person. They have to be.”

Tom FitzGerald is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: tfitzgerald@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @tomgfitzgerald