Season opens Friday with Montana Cup

Friday, August 17

Missoula, Mont.

5:30 PM

Montana

Fresno State

8/14/2018 6:42:00 PM | Soccer

By: Montana Sports Information

The Griz soccer team's 2018 schedule opens on Friday with the first day of the Montana Cup at South Campus Stadium in Missoula. The Grizzlies welcome Fresno State, San Francisco and Drake to town as Montana's 2018-19 athletics schedule, which will run through early June, begins.

On Friday, San Francisco and Drake will play at 2:30 p.m., followed by Montana and Fresno State at 5:30 p.m. On Sunday, Fresno State will face Drake at 10 a.m., with the Grizzlies and Dons playing at 12:30 p.m.

Coverage: All four matches will have live stats and video coverage through WatchBigSky.com. Montana's two matches also will have coverage on Pluto TV.

The field:

Montana went 10-7-4 last season, its fourth consecutive year with nine or more wins, and finished second in the Big Sky Conference at 5-2-3. The Grizzlies, who were picked third in this month's preseason coaches' poll, lost in the semifinal round of last November's Big Sky tournament.

Fresno State is coming off a 10-6-4 season but returns just four starters. The Bulldogs went 5-4-2 in Mountain West Conference matches last year to finish fifth out of 12 teams. FSU was picked sixth in this year's preseason poll, collecting one first-place vote.

San Francisco went 8-10-2 last season and finished sixth out of 10 teams in the West Coast Conference with a 4-5-0 league record. The Dons were picked to repeat that finish, coming in sixth in the preseason coaches' poll.

Drake went 13-4-2 last year, winning the Missouri Valley Conference title with a 6-0-1 mark, and closed out the regular season on a 12-match unbeaten streak (10-0-2), but the Bulldogs lost 2-0 to Northern Iowa in their first match of the league tournament. Drake was voted fourth in the MVC preseason poll.

"It's a lot of good soccer teams to bring in and have Missoula be able to come out and watch," said first-year coach Chris Citowicki. "It's good competition. There won't be an easy match for anyone. If you don't compete, someone is going to beat you.

"Every match is going to be a battle for us, which is exactly what I want. We need that because once we get into conference, every game is going to be a battle and we'll need to scrap for every result. We need to find our edge during the nonconference, and Fresno will help us do that, as will everyone else."

Early results offer little help: Montana faced an over-matched North Idaho team on Saturday afternoon at South Campus Stadium and came away with a lopsided 9-0 win.

The night before, Fresno State played at top-ranked and defending national champion Stanford and lost 4-0. The Bulldogs did not record a shot against the Cardinal.

In other words, not a lot of weight should be put on either result.

"We don't know what they're going to do, and they don't know what we're going to do, so it's up in the air," said Citowicki. "They're going to be competitive, so it should be fun. They have a good program with a good history."

History: Montana and Fresno State have played just once before, with the Bulldogs winning 1-0 on their home field in September 2016. ... The Grizzlies have also played San Francisco just once before as well, but two decades earlier. The Dons won 1-0 in November 1996 in the Grizzlies' third year as a program.

Keepers are back: Expected to be in goal on Friday evening for Fresno State is senior Nicole Theroux, who started all 20 matches last season and collected 10 wins while posting a 0.83 goals-against average.

In goal for Montana will be third-year sophomore Claire Howard. She started 20 of 21 matches last season and also won 10 matches. She had a 0.70 goals-against average, the best in the Big Sky and the second-lowest in program history.

Montana notes:

* The Grizzlies take a 12-match unbeaten streak (9-0-3) at South Campus Stadium into this weekend's matches. Montana went 6-0-2 at home last fall and 3-0-1 in its final four home matches in 2016.

The team's last home loss came against Idaho, 4-1, on Sept. 23, 2016. The team's last home loss to a nonconference opponent was earlier that month, on Sept. 11, against Gonzaga by a score of 1-0.

* Friday marks the debut of first-year coach Chris Citowicki, who spent last season on staff at North Dakota, his first year coaching in the Division I ranks. He spent the previous six seasons as the head coach at St. Catherine, a Division III school in St. Paul, Minn.

Citowicki is only the fourth head coach in program history, following in the footsteps of Betsy Duerksen (1994-2003), Neil Sedgwick (2004-10) and Mark Plakorus (2011-17).

* The 2018 season is Montana's 25th year as a program, which will be celebrated the weekend the Grizzlies open their Big Sky schedule against Northern Colorado on Sunday, Sept. 23. Montana has won six Big Sky regular-season championships, four Big Sky tournament titles in its history.

* Montana returns eight starters in 2018, four of whom earned some level of All-Big Sky Conference recognition last season.

Senior center back Taryn Miller was the Big Sky Defensive Player of the Year and first-team all-league. Senior midfielder Hallie Widner earned second-team honors, while senior midfielder Janessa Fowler and sophomore goalkeeper Claire Howard were honorable mention.

Widner, first-team All-Big Sky as a freshman and second-team as a sophomore, earned all-league honors for the third time in her career.

Other returning starters include senior forwards Ellie Otteson and McKenzie Warren, sophomore midfielder Raye Burton and sophomore forward Alexa Coyle.

Coyle led the team in scoring last year, collecting 10 points with a team-leading four goals and two assists. Seven of the team's eight leading scorers last fall are on the roster this season.

* Led by Miller and Howard, Montana had a Big Sky-leading 0.72 goals-against average last season. ... Of the team's seven losses last fall, six were by one goal. The only two-goal loss came at Utah State, 2-0, in the second match of the season.

* Montana took the No. 2 seed into last November's Big Sky tournament semifinals but was knocked off by No. 3 Northern Colorado, 2-1 in double overtime. It was the sixth time in seven years the Grizzlies played in the postseason.

Montana insider:

First-year coach Chris Citowicki is excited. "I'm actually trying to keep it down so I don't scare people," he said this week. "I'm ready to go. The team is ready to go."

Citowicki took over a program -- he was hired in early May, started in early June -- that wasn't in need of a lot of fixing. Under former coach Mark Plakorus, no Big Sky team had a better record during his seven-year tenure than the Grizzlies' 35-18-12 league mark from 2011-17.

In six of those seasons Montana advanced to the Big Sky tournament, once winning the whole thing, once finishing as runner-up.

"What I wanted to do was look at what Mark built and the way they were playing and not completely scrap it but instead build off of it," Citowicki said.

"A lot of the things we're doing with the possession style Montana has had for so many years, it's the same thing, just done in a slightly different way. We've just added a couple of pieces here and there, so overall it's been easy for it to click with the players, and we saw that in our exhibition game."

On Saturday on South Campus Stadium, Montana had little trouble with North Idaho, winning 9-0 in a scrimmage that was made up of three 30-minute periods.

Eight players scored for Montana, with the upperclassmen setting the tone early and the underclassmen joining in on the fun when their number was called.

"They are understanding the movements really well. The runs are great, the distribution is good. It's going to take until conference play to get it locked down, but with where we are in the season, I was pretty happy," said Citowicki.

Hallie Widner opened the scoring, followed by Ellie Otteson, Kennedy Yost, McKenzie Warren, Kylie Hanson, Zoe Transtrum, Karli Stone, Transtrum again and Alexa Coyle.

"The depth was awesome, and that was a concern," added Citowicki. "When we did sub players in, were they going to be in the right spaces? They were in the right spaces. They figured it out. It was rough to begin with, but people got it."

The scrimmage also gave Citowicki his first look at his team -- and everyone is new to him as a first-year coach -- not in a practice setting but an actual match environment, when the true sporting self is revealed.

"The piece that I told them before the game was to start showing me some of their personality as players," he said, "because some of them haven't done that yet. Now I'm getting a sense of who they are and the style they're going to play, and what we have to give them.

"For example, when Hallie gets it, you don't need to run and help her. Just leave her alone and she'll start distributing all over the place. People started showing me their personalities, which will make it easier for us to build the team."

As for the team's defense, Howard and Miller are back after big seasons last fall, and Taylor Hansen returns at outside back, but beyond that there are questions. And not many were answered on Saturday against the Cardinals.

Play took place almost exclusively on one side of the field, which put little stress on Montana's defenders.

"I assumed we'd be very dominant," said Citowicki. "The idea was to not let them have any shots on goal, and they ended up having one. Our goal was to completely dominate the game, and we did that."

But that leaves one question mostly unanswered: "How are we going to defend?" asked Citowicki. "We haven't come up against any grittiness or adversity yet, so I'm looking forward to seeing how we react to that this weekend."

Non-Montana match to monitor this weekend: Sunday, Seattle at Eastern Washington. The Eagles have been to the NCAA tournament the last two seasons out of the Big Sky. The Redhawks advanced in 2016 out of the WAC and fell just short last fall, losing to Utah Valley in a shootout in the title match.

Upcoming: Montana will fly on Tuesday to Honolulu, where they'll face Hawaii on Wednesday and Arizona State on Sunday. The match on Wednesday will be a late one, at least for those of us stateside. It kicks off at 11 p.m. (MT).