Arizona soccer’s trip to Oklahoma State is part of new scheduling model

In the past, Big 12 soccer teams were expected to play two matches a week almost every week of the conference season. Arizona head coach Becca Moros was not a big fan of that for a variety of reasons. She no longer has to worry about it.

Beginning this season, the league instituted a model where teams only play two matches a week every other week. The week in between, they play just once. While it adds an additional week to the conference schedule, there are numerous advantages, both physical and logistical.

“The nice part of this game being a Friday and the new schedule for soccer is that now we actually get a couple training days,” Moros said after the Sept. 18 match against BYU. “We were dying for the one extra training day this past week because the players who are playing a lot of minutes, they don’t get to work on anything. They’re constantly in recovery mode. The tempo of training is not combative, the intensity goes down, the number of touches they get on the ball. They can’t work on anything or make themselves feel more confident because they got to do some repetitions. Wo they’re just in a grind game after game after game, and so we got to train a whole extra day last week, and we get to do it again coming into these next games, and I think that’s important for our growth mentally and just to be ready for the game and ready to compete hard.”

The games they were going into at the time were the two road matches against Kansas State and Kansas. The Wildcats came off that road trip with a draw and a loss. While wins are always preferable, getting a point on the road can’t be dismissed.

The team is back on the road this week, but it’s once again playing just one match. The Wildcats traveled to Stillwater and will face Oklahoma State on Friday evening. After that, they’re done with competition until Thursday, Oct. 8 when Houston comes to Tucson. They follow that with a home game against Iowa State on Sunday, Oct. 11.

When: Friday, Oct. 2 @ 5 p.m. MST

Where: Neal Patterson Stadium in Stillwater, Okla.

Streaming:ESPN+

Stats:Arizona Live Stats

They hope to come back to Mulcahy Soccer Stadium with their first win in league play. Last season, they defeated the Cowgirls 3-1, but that team was struggling with injuries and had a difficult season. They finished 4-13-2 overall and 0-10-1 in conference play.

This year’s OSU team comes in with a bit more success. The Cowgirls have already bettered last year’s win total at 5-4-2 overall and 1-2-0 in the Big 12. The win was a shocker over a TCU team that was ranked sixth in the preseason United Soccer Coaches poll. While that proved to be a wildly overestimation of how the now-unranked Horned Frogs would do this season, it was still an indication that OSU was ready to compete.

The Cowgirls are prolific scorers. They have four players who have scored three or more goals led by Sonora Defini and Keaton Mitchell with four each.

As a team, OSU averages 2.09 goals per game, more than twice the 1.00 goals per game Arizona scores. Oklahoma State comes in ranked fifth in the Big 12 for goals scored; UA is 15th in the 16-team league.

The Cowgirls counter that by allowing 1.18 goals per game, which is tied with the Wildcats. Both bring up the rear in the Big 12 with OSU ranked 13th and Arizona 14th in goals against.

Arizona will have to lean heavily on its defense if it hopes to slow down Oklahoma State. The Wildcats spent most of the match at KU in their defensive half. It eventually became too much, with the Jayhawks putting two goals on the board in the final nine minutes of the match. A brief letdown of about 2.5 minutes from early in the 82nd to midway through the 84th turned a scoreless draw into a 2-0 Kansas victory.

Junior defender Zoe Mendiola noted the need to “persist through those challenges and keep learning from them, as well. I think especially in the Kansas game we were defending for quite a bit of the game, and I think while we were holding on for as long as we can, it was those small details that eventually got us.”

Arizona will have to take care of those small details in Stillwater, but there are definite openings. While OSU defeated TCU, the Cowgirls are coming off two straight losses. The last one came at Houston where the surging Cougars (7-1-3, 3-0-0) kept OSU off the board in a 1-0 victory.