Following two gutsy wins on the road, the No. 6 BYU women’s soccer team returns to South Field for three home games starting with the 1-8-1 UVU Wolverines.
“Our development everyday is so important,” assistant coach Chris Watkins said. “We have a saying, ‘stay thirsty my friends’. Realizing how important each game is and how bad a loss would be helps us stay thirsty.”
The Cougars come into the game 10-1 sporting an eight-game winning streak and will definitely need to stay thirsty to come out sharp in a trap game against a UVU team that, on paper, is drastically over-matched.
The Wolverines are currently on a four-game losing streak and had a disappointing start following a school record 12-win season a year ago.
The game is the final tune-up opportunity for the Cougars who begin league play next week. Following a six-game home stand, the Cougars took care of business on the road in their past two outings, with BYU’s defense leading to two shutouts.
“Those wins on the road show that we’re not just good at home,” sophomore forward Jaiden Thornock said. “It showed that we can go and play any team in the country and get the results that we want.”
After stumbling over Utah at the beginning of the season, the Cougars have really found their groove and worked their way into a top 10 ranking, as well as a reputation for hard work and energy. Junior goalkeeper Erica Owens feels her team was destined to get going and it just took working out a few bugs to get on track.
“We just new if we continued to work hard we’d get the results that we wanted,” Owens said. “We had a couple of big games where we came out and scored a lot of goals after our loss to Utah, and it helped us see that we are capable of being one of the best teams BYU ever had and now that we’ve realized that, nobody can stop us.”
Watkins added the team just needed a little wake-up call to get them going.
“Long Beach State was really a turning point for us,” he said. “Against some of our early opponents like Utah and Arizona we weren’t our best, we were good but we weren’t great. Our team as a whole, and especially our seniors, really took that as a wake-up call. It was like we were a ship in the sea and someone shot a big warning shot across our bow and that helped us to tidy up our ship.”
BYU and UVU kick off on South Field Thursday at 7 p.m.
