Before arriving on the UNC campus, forward Ally Sentnor hadn’t been away from soccer for more than a couple weeks at a time. It made 2021, her freshman season at Carolina, even more painful.
Sentnor, originally from the greater Boston area, was playing in a preseason exhibition match when she tried to execute a turn she’d done time and time again. She fell to the ground with an odd feeling in her knee. An MRI confirmed the worst: it was a torn ACL, which would sideline Sentnor for the entirety of UNC’s 2021 season.
“When I got the news, I was obviously devastated,” Sentnor told Chapelboro. “But my first mindset was, this is an obstacle. It’s a bump in my road. It’s not gonna be a perfect, straight arrow to the top. And I just put my head down and decided I was gonna do the rehab to the best of my ability and work as hard as I can to get back to where I was.”
Suddenly deprived of Sentnor’s potent goal-scoring ability, the Tar Heels struggled on the pitch, finishing sixth in the ACC standings and missing the conference tournament for the first time in program history. Even worse, the team dropped its opening NCAA Tournament match, also a program first.
In short, it was a season which hadn’t been seen before under head coach Anson Dorrance. Longtime fans may have found the season unexpected, but Dorrance said he figured it might be a challenging year once he saw Sentnor go down.
“Your heart goes right into your throat. You’re so upset,” the veteran head coach told Chapelboro. “You’re upset for the player, because it’s just a long trek back. But you’re also upset for your team, especially when a player like Ally Sentnor gets hurt, because we were not the sort of team on paper that was gonna score many goals without her. And sure enough, without her, we did not score many goals.”
Indeed, the Tar Heels were held without a goal in four matches during the season, including the stunning NCAA Tournament loss to South Carolina. By comparison, UNC had scored at least once in all 20 matches of the previous season.
But while the 2021 season was a struggle on the pitch, Sentnor was taking heart from her program’s overwhelming support off it.
“Everyone was so supportive,” she said. “My coaches still invested in me. My teammates were probably the best part of it. I decided to do my surgery here, because I just wanted to be around them and I wanted to be around the team, as much as I knew I was gonna miss the game and wanted to be on the field. I just wanted to be around the happiness and the supportiveness. The resilience from my teammates rubbed off on me.”
As the spring and early summer passed, Sentnor passed each rehab step with astounding speed, so much so that she earned a spot on the United States U-20 Women’s World Cup team which competed in Costa Rica in August. Sentnor described the experience with Team USA as “nerve-wracking,” but said it proved invaluable to her confidence on the pitch.
Now, Sentnor is fully back in the fold for the Tar Heels. Through the team’s first nine matches, Sentnor started five times and scored three times, helping lead a Carolina attack averaging well over two goals per game. But Dorrance and Sentnor both agree: she’s still not quite at the level she was pre-injury.
“I still have some work to do, and I think my instincts on the field need to come back,” Sentnor said. “And also, playing with a new team is always different. But I am feeling really good physically and every game my mental and confidence side of the game comes back. I grow every game, and hopefully I can surpass where I was by the end of the season.”
And when Sentnor does hit full fitness once again, Dorrance said he believes she can place herself among the all-time greats in program history.
“She’s an elite goal-scorer,” he said. “Which means she has the potential when she’s fully healthy to average a goal a game. She has the potential to have Mia Hamm-esque numbers. That’s a goal a game. She’s that threat for that. That’s gonna be a game-changer if we can keep her healthy all this fall.”
Featured image via The Daily Tar Heel/Samantha Lewis
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