If it was last season, both the men and women’s soccer seasons would be over for Chapman. However, thanks to the expansion of the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC) playoffs, they both now have a shot at redemption after finishing fifth.

Both squads lost their final game of the season at home in rough fashion. The men’s side was beaten by Occidental College 4-0, while the women lost 3-0 to Whittier College. None of that matters now. A play-in game against the respective fourth seeds is the focus for Chapman soccer.

The women’s team gets a rematch against Whittier on the road tonight, and the men play California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks tomorrow.

Head coach Courtney Calderon kept it quick and sweet when asked what her team will need to do differently to flip the script against the Whittier Poets.

“Stick to our game plan and execute it,” Calderon said.

The word consistency has been a mantra for the women’s team this year and they lacked it over the weekend. Too many sloppy giveaways allowed the Poets to break down the Panthers’ defense, and the home team was second to many 50/50 balls. Calderon isn’t going to harp too long on what went wrong, though.

“It’s all positive,” Calderon said. “(We) need to grind now.”

Men’s soccer will also need to grind out a win, as their two previous games against Cal Lutheran this season ended with one loss and one draw. Head coach Eddie Carrillo said that they need to put their loss to Occidental behind them and focus on fashioning a stout defensive shift to win on the road.

“Although Cal Lutheran is a strong opponent, we felt we were very competitive a week ago and even when we lost at home,” Carrillo said.

Simply being competitive won’t be enough in the playoffs, but Carrillo said that his team just needs to control what they can control.

“We (will) try to focus on continuing to do the things we do well and look for tendencies in our opponent that we can exploit,” he said.

Both Calderon and Carrillo emphasized one key thing that they want to instill in their locker rooms: this is an entirely new season. Forget all the old results and stats, you need three wins to become SCIAC champion. Both teams will have to survive on the road for the entire postseason, but a lack of pressure has never created diamonds.