After he suffered a broken leg last year in summer club ball, St. Louis University soccer player Mike Roach thought only that his 2010 season would be getting off to a slow start. It turned out that it got off to an awful start.

Roach, SLU's leading scorer in 2009 with 11 goals, was getting back to health just as the 2010 season was about to start. Then, during practice, he slid for a ball going out of bounds on SLU's practice field. He hit a sprinkler head, which put a hole in his kneecap.

"You see a bunch of muscles you've never seen before," he said. "It's not a pretty sight."

What happened after that wasn't a pretty sight for the Billikens, either. In a transitional season with new coach Mike McGinty taking over, SLU went 9-7-3 and would have benefited from Roach's leadership and ability. Roach, who had been on the MAC Hermann Trophy preseason watch list for 2010, watched from the bench, and the wait got even worse when his kneecap became infected.

Roach missed almost the entire season, returning in time to play in just the final six games at a point where he figures he was at only 65 percent of his full strength. (Because he had sat out a year in transferring to SLU from Indiana, he wasn't eligible to petition for a sixth year of eligibility.) Even though he played, it was pretty much an entire season lost.

SLU kicks off its 2011 season tonight against Northern Illinois at Hermann Stadium with a healthy Roach and a chance to get back to the NCAA tournament after missing out in McGinty's first season. The Billikens are unranked nationally but are picked second in the Atlantic 10 and host the conference tournament. They also face a grueling nonconference schedule in which almost every opponent was an NCAA tournament team last year.

"I feel good," Roach said earlier this week after practice. "It's good to be healthy."

Without Roach, SLU had no one score more than three goals last season, and the entire team scored just 25 — the same number one player, Dipsy Selolwane, had in 2001. SLU was shut out six times and, if it hadn't been for a defense that allowed just 21 goals, the season might have been worse than it was.

McGinty didn't know what he was missing at the start of last season, because he had seen Roach only on video. Now, after a spring season and fall practice, he knows.

"Now that I have him, I can see the impact he has on his teammates," McGinty said. "If we could go back in time and he was part of last year's group, things would have gone differently. I think this year, having him around definitely makes us a better team.

"No. 1, he's a very good soccer player, and the more good players you have, the better your team is. He has intangible leadership and personality qualities that this team needs. I have a lot of young kids, very good players, but Mike's been in 40 college soccer games. What needs to happen at any moment in the match, he's seen it before. He can, at some level, be a coach on field because I don't get to call time out and teach. Once the game begins, they've got to figure it out, and he figures it out faster."

Roach said that last season "was very frustrating. It's hard to watch your team every game when you know you can help and you're sitting on the sidelines and there's nothing you can do."

This year, he can help, as a leader on and off the field, as McGinty's imprint on the team begins to take shape. So what's Roach looking forward to most this year?

"A healthy season, first of all, so I can do as much as I can to make this team make a deep run in the tournament," he said. "I think we can make a deep run with this team. It's as committed as I've seen a group of guys. They're sharp and have a good attitude. We've got a swagger to ourselves right now."