Griz win on the road, claim Big Sky title

Wednesday, October 30

Cheney, Wash.

2 PM (MT)

Montana

7-5-6 (6-0-3)

Eastern Washington

9-7-2 (6-2-1)

Montana

Eastern Washington

10/30/2019 6:11:00 PM | Soccer

Box Score

By: Montana Sports Information

What does a Big Sky Conference championship program look like? That is, when it's not celebrating a title on another team's home field?

It looks like this: four hours before kickoff in a winner-take-all matchup, drilling on the details in a shaded hotel parking lot, in sub-freezing temperatures in Cheney, Wash.

That Chris Citowicki got into coaching only after being inspired by Herb Brooks and the movie Miracle would have been apparent to anyone who saw those two dozen Grizzlies on Wednesday morning.

Again!

And Montana did it again, adding this year's regular-season Big Sky championship to last season's tournament title with a 1-0 road victory over Eastern Washington on Wednesday afternoon.

It's the Grizzlies' first regular-season title since 2014, their seventh in program history, and gives them the No. 1 seed at next week's Big Sky tournament in Greeley.

Montana will face either No. 4 Northern Colorado or No. 5 Northern Arizona on Friday, Nov. 8, at 3 p.m. at UNC's Jackson Stadium.

"It's exactly the position you want to be in, right?" said Citowicki after the match. "It's a lot of pressure because there is a target on our back. But there has always been one because we're Montana.

"That target is even bigger now, because who doesn't want to take out Montana when they're No. 1? It's a healthy pressure that we have to get used to if we want to become the program I want us to be."

It was a match that was all about those details that Montana covered again and again in the cold hours before the match began.

Eastern Washington would take 13 corner kicks in the match, four more than any other Montana opponent this season. The result of all those opportunities: a single shot on goal the entire match for the Eagles.

The Grizzlies? They took one shot in the first half, just five for the match, and generated only two corner kicks.

But soccer matches are won in the details, not in time of possession or in numbers of chances created. It's the execution in the fast-arriving, fast-departing moments that makes a team a champion.

And Montana nailed it.

"One of the moments of the game is the set piece. We spend an absurd amount of time on our corners," said Citowicki.

"This morning we did our little jog, played our games, then spent 30 minutes walking through how we were going to defend corners and how we were going to attack corners."

Montana created its first in the 71st minute and appeared to score when Eastern Washington goalkeeper Kelsee Winston tumbled into the goal with the ball in her hands, but the referee saw it differently.

No matter. Corner kick No. 2 came in the 79th minute. Avery Adams played it perfectly to the near post, and there was Kendall Furrow, daughter of a former Nebraska Cornhusker lineman, looking the part.

She emerged from a crowd of players to put head to ball and put Montana 10 minutes from a championship.

That Furrow was even on the field was a be-ready-for-your-moment scenario that Brooks would have applauded.

She probably wouldn't have even touched the field had McKenzie Kilpatrick not gotten injured in the 61st minute.

From unexpected sub to name that will be etched somewhere special in the Montana history book, the deliverer of a championship.

"McKenzie comes off, Kendall goes on and seizes her moment," said Citowicki. "She is an animal in the air. If you put it in the right spot, she'll crush people to get the ball. I'm not surprised at all she scored."

That Montana won the details, of executing and defending corner kicks, is the reason Eastern Washington's dominance of the stat sheet didn't matter in the end.

The field was tilted in the Eagles' favor for most of the first half and start of the second. The corners kept coming, even if the threatening shots didn't.

But Citowicki knew that sooner or later the odds -- from a weird bounce, a player misreading the ball, from a perfectly placed pass -- would go in the other team's favor.

"We had a good conversation about what we had to do to change it up. We started winning 50-50 balls in the middle, which changed the game, which led to the corner, which led to the goal," he said.

"To be honest, I think Eastern was tactically smarter than us today. They created a lot more opportunities. We just defended well as a back line and with our two holding mids."

Two teams, one field, a trophy for one of them at the end of it, heartbreak for the other.

It was no Miracle on Ice, but it became a great moment born from great opportunity for Citowicki's team, winner of the Big Sky Conference regular season.