The Big 12 Champion Texas A&M soccer team will play five matches, four of them at Ellis Field, throughout the spring season, head coach G Guerrieri announced today.

 

“The spring semester is an important time of the year for the Aggie soccer program,” Guerrieri said. “This is the time of year when we really have a great opportunity to concentrate on the technical, physical, and tactical development of our individual players. We believe that all those championship trophies we’ve picked up in the fall seasons were actually won because of the developmental work we performed with our student-athletes in our spring ‘non-traditional’ season.”

 

A&M’s spring matches consist of five dates, beginning with a March 25 game against Rice at Ellis Field. The home stand will continue on March 29 with a match vs. Sam Houston State. The team will travel to Carrollton, Texas to play North Texas in its only road trip of the exhibition season on April 7 before returning to College Station to host Baylor on April 14. In the final match of the spring season, the Aggies will host SMU on April 21 at Ellis Field.

 

“We have already started to concentrate on the development of our players’ physical speed and development with 4 weight room session a week,” Guerrieri said. “And, we will layer in another four sessions-a-week of soccer-specific training starting this coming Tuesday, February 14. Then, after Spring Break, we will play five other college teams in exhibition matches and maybe add in one international match as well.”

 

The Aggies advanced to their 17th straight NCAA Tournament in 2011 after winning a 12th-and-final Big 12 Championship in November. The team defeated LSU at home in the NCAA First Round before falling to Virginia Tech in the Second Round to end the season with a 16-6-2 overall record and a 6-1-1 conference mark.

 

“The NCAA limits us in travel and to not miss any class time during the non-traditional season, so we have worked to find competitive college games from teams in our region of the country,” Guerrieri said. “These spring exhibitions will be a great chance for our fans to see the development of our young players and get into Ellis Field to see some good college games for FREE.”