Six UM opponents advance to NCAA Championship
11/19/2008 12:00:00 AM | Soccer
The University of Montana soccer team ended its 2008 season with a 6-11-2 record after losing to Weber State, 1-0, in the semi-finals of the Big Sky Conference tournament.
With the win, the Wildcats advanced to the finals to face No. 3 Northern Arizona who had downed No. 2 Portland State by just one goal as well. The battle for the NCAA Championship spot was hard fought by both the Wildcats and the Lumberjacks, yet, in the end, Northern Arizona defeated the BSC season champions on their home turf, 2-1.
???I was I little bit surprised [by the result],??? said Montana???s head coach Neil Sedgwick, ???but Northern Arizona is a good team with good attacking players and Weber, of course, is solid all around. We always knew that Arizona could knock them off.???
Montana faced the BSC tournament champs at home just two weeks prior to the BSC tournament where the Grizzlies battled for a victory over the Lumberjacks. After 110 minutes of play, the match ended in a 1-1 draw in double overtime.
The tie with NAU was not Montana???s only closely fought encounter against teams that advanced to the 2008 NCAA Championship. The Grizzlies??? second match of the season was against Minnesota, a team that carried a record of 20-3-0 to the NCAA Championship. At South Campus stadium Montana lost by just one lone goal to the Gophers to end the match 2-1.
Still finishing its 2008 season, Minnesota has made it through the first two rounds of the NCAA Championship. The Gophers downed Marquette, 2-1, in the round of 64.?? They then shut out South Dakota State, 2-0, in the round of 32. The Gophers are to play unbeaten Notre Dame, one of the tournament???s four No. 1 seeds, Friday, Nov. 28, in the round of 16. The winner of that match will advance to the quarterfinals.
As Sedgwick stated, ???six teams [that we faced this season] advanced to the Championship. Northern Arizona being one of them and several PAC-10 schools and a Big-10 school still in the tournament really shows how close we were this year with this group of players.???
The 2008 pre-conference season was a continuous struggle for the Grizzlies who claimed only three victories before facing BSC teams. But the fact that five teams that defeated Montana made the NCAA Championship is a sure telling sign that the Grizzlies faced some steep competition right from the start of the season.
The six teams that Montana faced in 2008 and that advanced to the NCAA Championship include: Denver, Northern Arizona, Minnesota, UC Santa Barbara, Washington State, and Washington.??
Although it was a tough pre-conference season for the Grizzlies, Sedgwick was pleased with the competition. ???It was a good thing to play the programs that are turning heads and seeing results on a national level.
???Our players being exposed to the speed of the game, which obviously wasn???t well above what we were playing at, showed us exactly where we wanted to be. Hopefully the team can look at the teams that have made the NCAA tournament this year and see that they are playing at that level and they are in that league as well."
