G Guerrieri reflects on non-conference play, previews opening SEC match

On the loss/ trip out to BYU...

Any time you go on the road it’s tough. The trip to BYU was a great trip. We took off Wednesday morning - the girls missed class - we were there Thursday and then traveled all day on Friday to get back. The BYU game was alright, we started off strong but then they over took us in the midfield. Our goalkeeper, Shantel Hutton was fantastic. Their first goal was a ball that hit the right post, hit Jordan Hill, and then went to the left post and then went into the goal. It was an own goal. They didn’t count it as one because it was their statistician but it was. Three minutes later, on a ball that we didn’t clear well went right to the foot of their All-American striker who finished it. Those are things that we can build upon. In the second half we made some good adjustments. I thought the girls battled hard the whole game and never gave in. We played a lot of people on the night so we would have people fresh on Sunday. BYU was a really good side. The cool thing is that we are at No. 7 now in the RPI. The SEC is in very good shape on the soccer side of things. The way the math works out, whoever ends up winning the SEC is looking at getting a 1-seed or 2-seed in the NCAA Tournament. We are the favorites to do that. Arkansas and Vanderbilt had great weekends. We feel pretty good about where we are. The confidence gained from scoring four goals. I thought it was important that we re-established our roles after BYU and what we expected of players. We had a lot of players who were trying to play other people’s roles. Sorting that out on Sunday was great. Ally Watt had two goals which was good to see and she set up the last goal of the day to Asdis to score. Tera Ziemer also got her first ever goal. We know we have to play a good team in Starkville, its never easy to play there. 

On the four-goal performance against UNLV...

It was great to see our attack really get going and getting Katie Smith going up top. We really want to attack with four forwards and not just two. So getting them up there and putting Ally and Asdis in better positions to score was good. Any time we go into an SEC game, we are going to play against a well-coached good team. We are looking to build off the UNLV performance out in Starkville.