BATON ROUGE — LSU soccer head coach Brian Lee met with members of the media on Tuesday at Walk-On’s Bistreaux to discuss his team’s position in the Southeastern Conference and look ahead to the Tigers’ upcoming weekend against a pair of SEC Western Division rivals.
The Tigers will play host to the 21st-ranked Ole Miss Rebels on Friday at 7 p.m. CT and Mississippi State on Sunday at 1 p.m. at the LSU Soccer Complex.
Sunday’s match against the Bulldogs is slated for a live television broadcast on Comcast Sports Southeast and will also be available on Cox Sports Television (Cable Channel 37) in the Baton Rouge area.
Below is a full transcript from today’s press conference.
LSU HEAD COACH BRIAN LEE
Opening Statement…
“I’d like to open with a congratulations to the volleyball team on a huge win last week over sixth-ranked Florida. It’s an exciting time to be part of LSU athletics. Over our five years here, we have really enjoyed being a fall sport and being able to compete along with our football team, who is always in the top 10 and competing for national championships, and volleyball, who has been a solid top-25 team and four-time SEC West champion. To see volleyball continue to succeed and with football on their way to a good fall again, we’re just excited to be part of it. We really feel like when they win, it helps us win. When the football team wins, it helps us win on Sunday. When we see the volleyball team with a great result, hopefully it springboards us to success as well.
“Coming off last weekend, where we split games at Kentucky and Vanderbilt, we’re excited about what we’ve got ahead of us this weekend with Ole Miss and Mississippi State. Just over the midway point of the SEC season, we’re sitting in a great spot at 5-1-0 in the league. We’ve got a bit of a round robin with some of the other top teams down the stretch, so we feel like things are in our hands if we perform and get results.
“Starting Friday night, we have Ole Miss. We’ve seen a lot of them on tape. They’re a very good team. They’re in most of the polls this week. Their RPI is somewhere in the top 20 or top 25 in the country. They’re set for the NCAA Tournament and they’re a real contender for the SEC West and SEC down the stretch. They’re pretty athletic, they’re fast and they have good ball movement and are a possession-oriented team. They’re very organized and well coached, so it will be a tremendous challenge for us on Friday night. We’re expecting and hoping for our usual great crowd. We always feel like when we play at home, especially on a Friday night, we can open up with a goal advantage because of the fan support we bring and how vocal they are. We’re looking forward to the challenge and we’ll see what the next three weeks bring on a game-by-game basis.”
On competing against Kentucky on a wet and muddy field …
“Basically if there’s no lightning, you’re playing within reason. It was pretty close to a player hazard situation on Friday. There was a lot of standing water and you couldn’t really pass the ball. In the course of the game, the most connected passes was two or three on the night. Certainly, we wanted to play, to be dead honest. With the SEC, the way it works, if you postpone a game, you play on the last Sunday of the year, which falls right before the SEC Tournament, which falls right before the NCAA tournament. If you postpone a game and you think you might have success in the SEC Tournament, you’re looking at five games in eight days right before the NCAA Tournament, which catches up to you. We were fine with getting the game in. It probably turned a game in which we have a tremendous advantage in terms of talent and athleticism into a toss-up game. Kentucky scored a goal, and the only way a goal was going to come in that game was probably off a ball that didn’t hit the ground. It came out of a corner, floated a nice ball in, headed it in and then we missed our couple chances. We’re perfectly happy with our kids and the result in the end. We worked really hard, showed good character and we just happened to lose a game that was affected a bit because of bad conditions.”
On playing Kentucky and Vanderbilt without Rachel Yepez…
“Rachel is a four-year starter, our top scorer on that day and certainly she’s a valuable part of our team, a big part of our team. She brings a lot of intangibles in terms of work ethics and work rate. She’s just a winner, and we’re hoping to get her back this weekend. One of the things that we’re really striving for is to be healthy at the end of the season. The last couple years, we feel like we’ve limped into the postseason and not been able to give our best showing in the NCAA Tournament. We feel like we’ve got some good team depth so we’re OK with not playing with a key player. We played Duke without Melissa Clarke and played Georgia and Tennessee with Clarke at 50 percent, and now we played Kentucky and Vanderbilt without Yepez. The only thing we can do is grow from it. Other kids have stepped up and become impact players. As soon as she’s healthy again, we’ll be a better team than we were before she was injured.
On having two close games following four impressive SEC wins…
“When you get into conference play you never know those situations until you hit them, even during the 6-0 and 5-1 wins against some good teams. Some of them were very comfortable. Auburn, even though it was 2-0, was very comfortable, and the Alabama game, even though it was 3-0, was very edgy. We’ve talked to the team and told them that you’re not going to win the SEC on easy days, on beautiful sunny days where you can just pass the ball and everything goes right and you finish all your chances. You’re going to win the SEC when you’re playing bad and you’ve got to grind out results.
“In the second half against Kentucky, that was a great growth moment for us, for the team to see we can fight and get ourselves in position in bad conditions and we certainly had our chances to win that game. Against Vanderbilt, we were down 1-0 at the half and really not playing as well as we would have liked, to be able to come out and put up that kind of performance in the second half, we’re really excited. To get an overtime win hopefully springboards us because Friday night is going to be a great game against Ole Miss. It’s going to be a goal either way and we’re going to have to fight for 90 minutes or maybe even more to get a result. The kids have shown tremendous character.”
On being undefeated in overtime games…
“I think we’re really fit, to start with. We’ve got a bunch of experience players as well, who have been in plenty of overtimes and tight spots, so they’re composed in those times of games. We’re also supremely fit. We’ve been very good in second halves all season. Generally, game-to-game, we’re picking up our performance late in the game, and that’s just a case of our strength and conditioning department. We’ve got one of the best ones in the country, headed by Tommy Moffitt, and it’s not just football that he’s setting the tone for. It works all the way to soccer and our strength guy, Ben Cohen, is doing a tremendous job. Our kids have worked so hard for the nine months offseason. We always talk about deserving to win, and a big factor in that is how hard you work in February and March way away from the season. Their fitness is tremendous.”