Excellence is expected for each athletic program at the University of Tennessee. While the teams of Bruce Pearl, Pat Summitt and Phillip Fulmer steal most of the headlines around Knoxville, Ange Kelly has quietly turned the Lady Volunteers soccer program into one of the best in the country.

Kelly was hired as an assistant coach for the inaugural season of Tennessee soccer in 1996 and remained in that position for four seasons. The Lady Vols struggled to a 37-40-2 record while never winning a Southeastern Conference tournament match before Kelly was named head coach in 2000.

"To be perfectly honest I never dreamt of being a college coach," Kelly said prior to a practice last semester. "I couldn't be more grateful for the position I'm in. For 364 days a year this doesn't feel like a job."

It's easy for coaching to not feel like a job for Kelly, who has enjoyed much success since taking over the head coaching position. The Lady Vols amassed a record of 117-48-14 and have won the SEC regular season and tournament titles three times each during Kelly's eight years at the helm. Kelly added a victory to that total when the Lady Vols defeated Chattanooga to open the 2008 season.

Kelly has also led the team to success at the national level, guiding Tennessee to seven straight NCAA tournaments. The streak includes appearances in the round of 16 during five of the past six seasons. The Lady Vols are joined by Notre Dame, Portland, Penn State, Florida State, UCLA and North Carolina as the only teams to advance to the tournament's third round in at least five of the past six years.

"When I was being recruited we weren't nationally ranked at all," said former player and current Lady Vol assistant Keeley Dowling. "Now we're vying for a national championship and that's our ultimate goal."

Kelly was a four-year starter as a player at North Carolina and a Canadian national team member prior to becoming a coach. The former Tar Heel set records at the time for career games played and games started, while helping her team to four consecutive national titles during her time at North Carolina.

She played for Canada for nine years and competed in each of her team's matches in the 1995 World Cup, en route to becoming the third woman inducted into the Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame. Kelly's experience as a player has proven to be an important part of her résumé.

"As a player she's obviously played at the highest level," Dowling said. "Being a player myself you want to surround yourself with people like that. She's a phenomenal coach because she's experienced all those things and really understands the game."

Kelly's time at North Carolina was spent playing for the most legendary coach in women's college soccer, Anson Dorrance. The Tar Heels have won 18 of the 26 national championships in the history of the sport and have piled up a record of 648-32-19 since Dorrance became the program's first coach in 1979. Kelly believes Dorrance's demeanor is the most important thing she took away from her time playing for the soccer icon.

"Just seeing how successful he is, yet how modest and open-minded he is, I really feel like I've tried to adopt that philosophy," Kelly said. "I'll never say that I know everything about the game because the game is constantly evolving and changing. I just want to continue being a student of the game and learn as I go from whoever I may learn from."

Kelly has applied her lessons learned to lead the way to unprecedented success at Tennessee. The next step for the program comes with advancing past the third round of the NCAA tournament, where the Lady Vols have lost each of the five times they have advanced that far.

"You can only knock on the door so often," Kelly said. "We need to figure out a way to get past that game and I think there's no better time than the present. Hopefully in 2008 we'll surpass that and move forward."

It will undoubtedly take building upon the successes of the past to steal many of those headlines from Fulmer, Summitt or Pearl. However, Kelly does not see the successes of her peers at Tennessee as anything other than an incentive to win.

"I think right now is a very special time to be a part of Tennessee athletics from top to bottom," said Kelly. "It definitely keeps the coaches on their toes to know that just to be able to fit in you have to at least win an SEC Championship and if you don't make it to the Final Four or the Elite Eight, you're doing something wrong. That's a very high standard."