The UTRGV Men’s Soccer Team is in full swing and the Vaqueros are off to their best start since the program was revived three years ago. Now, with the beginning of Western Athletic Conference play just days away, Head Coach Paul Leese and his team are ready for the WAC grind.
While the start of the season was delayed due to Hurricane Harvey, the Vaqueros strung together a streak of three wins, beating Loyola University Chicago 1-0, Northern Illinois University 2-0, and a come-from-behind effort to knock off Our Lady of the Lake University 4-1.
UTRGV was sitting at 3-1-1 before last Friday’s match against San Diego State. Results were not available at press time. And while still early in the year, the team has found a rhythm on the pitch.
Redshirt sophomore and team captain Jaakko Hietikko, a forward with one goal and three assists on the season, said the team feels good after gaining experience in non-conference play.
“We feel good,” Hietikko said. “We have had a couple of good games. We have started better than any other season yet and we actually found our scoring rhythm in the last game. We scored four goals.”
A season ago, UTRGV finished 4-4-2 in conference play, which was good enough for sixth place after being voted to finish 11th out of 11 teams in the Preseason WAC Coaches Poll. This year, the Vaqueros were picked to finish eighth in the conference.
In 2016, Leese’s squad finished 3-2-2 against the seven teams chosen to land ahead of UTRGV, including a 2-1 victory over WAC champion University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Midway through conference play a year ago, the Vaqueros began to click on the field, finally playing with the rhythm Leese seeks. They hope to carry that momentum over to this year’s season, along with new players and fresh minds.
“I think the fluidity, you could see it was around the halfway point of the conference season, where we started to learn how to play with each other and we were familiar with the team shape,” he said. “Our overall game intelligence, our overall familiarity of how we liked to play was very strong last year. Now, the quicker we can get the new guys into that mentality, the better off we’ll be.”
Although the Vaqueros had a winning record versus the top seven teams in 2016, it was the opposite against lower WAC competition. University of Missouri-Kansas City and Houston Baptist University were voted to finish at the bottom of the conference, but UTRGV came up short against those two teams, losing 2-0 to UMKC and 3-1 to HBU.
“The conference is strong, that’s going to be on any given day, but for me, it is more important to get more consistency against the lower teams,” Leese said. “Those are the teams we probably need to add more points to if we are going to be successful this year in the conference.”
The Vaqueros are set to open up the WAC season with a pair of road games starting Friday against UMKC and Sunday against Air Force Academy. UTRGV’s WAC opener is scheduled for 4 p.m. Oct. 6 at the UTRGV Soccer and Track & Field Complex.
