BATON ROUGE — After nearly three weeks of preparation, the LSU soccer team is ready to get its spring season underway as it travels to College Station, Texas, on Saturday to take on national power Texas A&M in a match scheduled for 7 p.m. at the Aggie Soccer Stadium.
The Aggies are coming off of a successful 2006 campaign in which they advanced to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament and finished the season with a 17-6-1 overall record and ranked No. 5 in the country according to the National Soccer Coaches Association of America.
“Facing quality opposition this spring is very important for the development of our young team, and Texas A&M is certainly one of the premier programs in the country,” said LSU head coach Brian Lee. “G. (Guerrieri), Phil (Stephenson) and Lori (Stephenson) are first class in everything they do and we’re excited to measure our team against their high standard on Saturday night.”
Lee said that he has long admired the success that Coach Guerrieri has brought to the Texas A&M program and hopes to lead the Tigers to similar success in the very near future. The Aggies are the three-time defending champions of the Big 12 Conference and have advanced to the NCAA Tournament in each of the last 12 years under Guerrieri.
“We have used Texas A&M as a benchmark on how to build a championship caliber program from the day we arrived at LSU,” Lee said. “They are obviously national contenders year in and year out and are the three-time defending champions of the Big 12. We hope to emulate their success here at LSU in the near future.”
Lee has the Tigers well on their way to becoming one of the premier programs in the SEC as he is set to compete during both the spring and fall seasons with one of the more talented clubs in the league. In fact, a total of 16 players return from last season’s squad with starting experience in conference action, including nine freshman and five sophomores.
The Tigers are coming off of one of their more successful seasons in recent memory as they finished the 2006 campaign with a 9-8-3 overall record against perhaps the nation’s toughest schedule. Eight of LSU’s opponents finished the season ranked in the Top 30 of the final Ratings Percentage Index with only national powers Notre Dame and Santa Clara facing more teams ranked in the Top 30 with nine.
Saturday’s match marks the beginning of one of the more challenging spring schedules in all of women’s college soccer as the Tigers are also slated to go on the road to face ACC powers Wake Forest and Duke on the weekend of March 23, while also battling perennial NCAA Tournament participant and SEC Western Division rival Ole Miss on March 31.