Texas soccer finishes regular season strong. When do the Longhorns start the postseason?
Despite a pair of season-ending injuries in its first SEC campaign, the Texas soccer team will enter the postseason with a surge of momentum.
The SEC Tournament begins this weekend at Ashton Brosnaham Soccer Complex in Pensacola, Fla., but the Longhorns won’t play until Tuesday, when they will face either LSU or Auburn in the quarterfinals.
Texas (13-3-2, 6-3-1) had to navigate its new conference slate without two of its senior leaders. Center back EmJ Cox and forward Trinity Byars suffered season-ending knee injuries in the first month of the season, leaving coach Angela Kelly to juggle her lineup and incorporate some young players on the pitch. But overcoming those injuries has supplied a certain level of "grittiness" that should prove helpful in the postseason, she said.
"I think our team rallied and figured it out," Kelly said. "I'm so proud of how the group has grown and the people that have stepped in to replace those types of personalities and talent. And I think grit and grinding and determination and all these things go into championship teams, but that wasn't the initial part of our identity when we started the year, right?
"This team has had to find ways to make that (grit) prominent over the course of this season, specifically in the SEC conference play. I've been really, really proud that we've found our own identity as a unit. Everybody's just stepping up."
Freshman Amalia Villarreal, Texas soccer on a roll
The Longhorns have especially stepped up in recent weeks, winning four of their last five matches to surge into third place in the final SEC standings with 19 points. Mississippi State (27 points) and Arkansas (25) finished ahead of the Longhorns, who ended the regular season with the same conference record as they had in their final Big 12 campaign a year ago.
Senior All-American midfielder Lexi Missimo carried even more of the offensive burden in the absence of Byars by tallying team highs with 12 goals and nine assists. In the process, she surpassed Byars as the program’s all-time leading goal scorer with 56 to go along with her program-record 62 assists.
Freshman winger Amalia Villarreal helped fill Byers’ role up top and tied for first in the SEC with five goals in conference play.
"We all had to step up in our own way, and I'm just happy I could do it," said Villarreal, a 5-foot-2 dynamo from Lansing, Mich., who has played for the U.S. youth national team.
And how has the freshman's year gone in her first season in Austin, both on and off the pitch?
"I think it's incredible," she said. "I've been to a few cool places, and the team, just being in the environment with them, it's been amazing the whole season. I wouldn't want to trade it for the world."
Texas players: Longhorns 28th in RPI, but don't overlook us
Texas will enter the postseason ranked No. 28 by the NCAA in RPI, a major factor when it comes to tournament seeding. But defender Madison Haugen said the Longhorns' resolve has been tempered by the injuries as well as the grueling SEC schedule.
"I think also every SEC opponent, thus far, has really prepared us," she said. "I think going into the tournament, we've seen almost everything you could see. We're ready."
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas soccer preps for first SEC Tournament
