MORGANTOWN – The WVU men’s soccer team hit the ground running to open its 2025 campaign with a dominant victory over visiting Manhattan on Thursday afternoon, at Dick Dlesk Soccer Stadium.
The 16th-ranked Mountaineers defeated the Jaspers 5-2 to begin the season strong. Junior Pablo Pozos got his 2025 off to a hot start with a first-half hat trick in the game’s opening 30 minutes. Marcus Caldeira and Ethan Dekel-Daks also added goals in the first half for WVU (1-0-0). Isaac Scheer provided three assists.
“Pleased for Pablo and pleased with the nature of the result,” WVU head coach Dan Stratford said. “There were a lot of positives for us today. I think we’ve seen some positive progression from the beginning of the preseason until now, but we have to maintain that quality and continue to progress as the season goes on.”
The first goal came after the WVU defense forced a turnover in the midfield and worked it into the attacking third. Caldeira found space on the right wing and played the ball into the box for Pozos, who finished the play with the first goal of the season for the Mountaineers.
Pozos struck again 90 seconds later with his second goal in as many chances, this time with a neat finish after a pass from Felix Ewald.
“Marcus and I have a very good connection with Issac and Felix behind us,” Pozos said. “It allows us to work the ball wide and still have a lot of numbers in the box for crosses. Today it was me, but honestly, it could be anyone of us any game. We just want to win.”
The Jaspers settled in after the second goal by Pozos and eventually earned a free kick in the middle of the field from 25 yards out. Striker Martin Rodriguez fired a laser into the right corner of the WVU goal to cut the lead in half, 2-1.
Caldeira, the ninth-leading scorer in WVU program history, tallied his first goal of the season in the 26th minute with a well-placed shot on the end of a pass by Isaac Scheer to extend the lead back to two goals.
Pozos completed his hat trick five minutes later with another goal inside the Manhattan box, and Dekel-Daks added WVU’s fifth in the 34th minute to give the hosts a 5-1 lead at the break. It’s the second season in a row for WVU that a player from Spain has scored an opening-day hat trick, as former WVU striker Sergio Ors-Navarro did so in 2024.
“We’ve been fortunate with some great goal scorers here in recent years, some who have reached double-digits, which is hard to do,” Stratford said. “We know what some of our players will look like and what threat they possess.
The second half saw back-and-forth action that yielded no goals for the first 30 minutes, until the Jaspers used a fastbreak to gain a numbers advantage on the WVU back line and added their second off the foot of William Fagerberg.
But the lead built by the Mountaineers was too much for Manhattan to overcome in the second half, and the defending Sun Belt regular-season champions started off their season with a huge victory at home.
WVU returns home to Dick Dlesk Soccer Stadium, at 6 p.m. Monday, to host La Salle.
