I hope your holidays were wonderful and that your 2010 has started well.

Here at A&M, the university has re-opened for business, but our students remain on vacation until the 19^th of January!  That equals a 5 week vacation from classes for our lucky students.  I know that our players have been having fun in many different locations around the world and have enjoyed being back with their families and old friends during the holiday.  But, we miss them and I wouldn’t mind getting them back in town so we can get started with our exciting 2010 soccer plans!

Congratulations New Graduates!

Micah Stephens, Cydne Currie, and Emily Peterson are the newest Aggie soccer players to have earned their degrees from Texas A&M.  They walked across the graduation stage at Reed Arena a few weeks ago.  Cydne will be in College Station this spring, working with kids and youth soccer teams.  Meanwhile Micah and Petey have big plans - before they fully join the “real world” they are planning a big trip around the world!

This spring they will be literally travelling around the world, hitting destinations in Brazil, Argentina, Australia, India, Tibet, China, Russia, and other places on their way back to Texas.  It’s quite an excursion, but it’s no surprise that they will follow their curiosities and gain huge life experiences as an extra bonus to their journey through life.  Emily has told me that she’ll write with updates, but I’m still lobbying her to keep up her Aggie Soccer Player journal  on www.aggiesoccer.com so all of us can live vicariously through her and Micah.

Grades Are IN

I’m again pleased to say that our student-soccer players are doing well in their studies at Texas A&M and are on course to graduate.  And, I’m especially proud to brag about the really extraordinary ones that have continued to pace the athletic department’s academic standards by scoring exceptional grades in the fall.

Many of our players made it onto the Dean’s List (3.0 GPA or higher), which is quite an accomplishment considering all the extra hours they are on the road competing in the fall.  So, with us not playing any out of town matches this spring, I anticipate our team Grade Point Average (GPA) to be even higher this coming May.

Fall 2010 Schedule

I have almost completed our 2010 game schedule for next fall.  I think that our fans and especially our season ticket holders will be very excited about the slate of games and the high level of opponents that we’ll face in the fall.

In the non-conference portion of our season, we’ll face 9 opponents, 7 of which were in the 2009 NCAA Championship Tournament!  This gives us arguably the toughest schedule in the NCAA in 2010, and fits in with our goal developing our team into an NCAA Champion by playing and beating the toughest competition available.

The Big 12 portion of the season will again be tough.  Even though we were the only team in the Big 12 to earn an at-large bid to the ’09 NCAA Tournament I anticipate the conference being much stronger than it was last year.  I know that every team will be pumped up at the opportunity to play us, especially when we travel into some very difficult venues (at Kansas, at Missouri, at Nebraska, at Iowa State, and at Austin).

We still don’t have game times set for these matches, and I’m still waiting on some contracts to be signed by our opponents, but this is the tentative schedule of matches for next fall:

Sat Aug 14 – Home Exhibition Game (opponent TBD)

Fri Aug 20 – Home v UNC

Sun Aug 22 – Home v ST. JOHNS

 

Fri Aug 27 – Home v VIRGINIA TECH

Sun Aug 29 – Home v WASHINGTON STATE

 

Fri Sep 3 – Home v DAVIDSON

 

Fri Sep 10 – @ Purdue

Sun Sep 12 – @ Indiana

 

Fri Sep 17 – @ Portland

Sun Sep 19 – Home v CAL ST NORTHRIDGE

 

Fri Sep 24 – Home v COLORADO

Sun Sep 26 – @ Nebraska

 

Fri Oct 1 – @ Kansas

 

Fri Oct 8 – Home v BAYLOR

Sun Oct 10 – Home v TEXAS TECH

 

Fri Oct 15 – @ Iowa State

Sun Oct 17 – @ Missouri

 

Fri Oct 22 – Home v OU

Sun Oct 24 – Home v OSU

 

Fri Oct 29 – @ Texas

There is no easy match on our schedule.  Our players will have to be ready, motivated, and able to execute the game plan to be successful.  But, I wouldn’t put together a slate of opponents like this if I didn’t believe 100% in what this team will be able to do.

We return an incredible crew of soccer players who thrive on competition in 2010.  Plus, we’re adding a few new student-athletes to our already talented corps.  * I’ll talk about the new players in a future journal.

This spring is an important season for us to develop and mature our players into a team of champions.  Wins and losses won’t be the only measure of success for this team during the non-traditional (spring) season, as we develop the individual players and begin to shape the way we want to play to win in the fall.  I’m still finishing up our spring schedule and will post it sometime in the next few weeks when it’s completed.

Big 12 Meetings Ahead

I will probably post my next journal sometime after the Martin Luther King Jr holiday of January 18^th.  In the time between now and then I’ll be attending our annual Big 12 Soccer Coaches meeting in Irving, Texas as well as the National Soccer Coaches Association of America Convention in Philadelphia, Pa.  By the way, while I’m on the subject, we (the NSCAA) must have the worst convention planners/negotiators in the nation – we always end up in cold, snowy places in January, while our counterparts in volleyball, football, and other sports seem to find ways to do their convention in warm, sunny locations like Vegas, Orlando, and Hawaii.

Anyway…

The Big 12 meetings should be interesting this year.  I don’t anticipate any new rules being enacted against our fans or yell leaders (like in years past – those rules remain), but I do think we’ll talk about future scheduling models and a conference plan in scheduling non-conference matches so that our teams have a higher RPI going into the Big 12 portion of our season. 

Remember last year that only A&M and Kansas had Top 20 RPI’s going into the Big 12 season.  And, had A&M not been upset in the Big 12 Tourney Final by OSU, there is a strong possibility that we would have been the only Big 12 team in the NCAA Tournament.  It was a shame that the regular season champs (Mizzou) didn’t get into the NCAAs because of how badly they performed early in the year; it sets a bad precedent…

Again, I’ll post another journal around the time our players return to campus for the start of the spring semester.  Until then I wish you well.

Gig ‘em! –Coach G