BATON ROUGE — The LSU soccer team is well into its preparation for the 2008 season and continues its difficult spring exhibition schedule with a trip to College Station, Texas, on Sunday to take on national power Texas A&M at the Aggie Soccer Stadium at 1 p.m.
The Tigers have gotten off to fast start in their spring exhibition schedule after earning a pair of 0-0 draws against national powers North Carolina and Duke on Feb. 16.
This marks the second straight spring that the Tigers will battle the Aggies in College Station as Texas A&M won last year’s match by a 2-0 margin at the Aggie Soccer Stadium, which was the host site for the 2007 NCAA Women’s College Cup in December.
“Facing quality opposition is very important for the development of our team this spring, and Texas A&M is certainly one of the premier programs in the country,” said LSU head coach Brian Lee. “We opened really well against two Top 10 programs in North Carolina and Duke, and I expect us to show that same competitive fire when we kick it off against the Aggies on Sunday.”
The Aggies are coming off of a successful 2007 campaign in which they posted an 18-4-2 record en route to winning their fourth consecutive Big 12 championship and finishing the season ranked as high as No. 13 nationally following a trip to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
Texas A&M has set the standard for other programs in the Big 12 Conference since head coach G. Guerrieri arrived in 1993 as the Aggies have won a total of six Big 12 regular season titles and have advanced to the NCAA Tournament in each of the last 13 seasons under his watch.
“Coach Guerrieri has built what has become one of the elite programs in the country during his time in College Station, and they don’t appear to be slowing down any time soon after winning a fourth straight Big 12 title this year,” Lee said. “We have used their success as a benchmark on how to build a championship caliber program since the first day we arrived in Baton Rouge.
“This spring season is just the next step in our development of becoming a nationally-respected program, and our kids have shown their maturity with the way they’ve competed thus far.”
The Tigers are in the midst of one of the more challenging spring schedules in all of women’s college soccer as they have already faced the likes of North Carolina and Duke, while they follow their trip to College Station with matches against Northwestern State on March 12, Southeastern Louisiana on April 2 and nationally-ranked Texas on April 12.