Memphis Tigers women start conference play with win over North Texas

After nearly a month away from the friendly confines of the Billy Murphy Track & Soccer Stadium, the University of Memphis women’s soccer team returned home. Not only did they return home but they also started AAC conference play by hosting the North Texas Mean Green. It took some doing, but the Tigers were finally able to find a breakthrough in the second half and were able to get a 2-0 win.

Coach Brooks Monaghan was certainly among those glad the Tigers were finally back home despite the tough test they were given by the visitors.

“It’s great to be home. It’s great to be home. But you’re supposed to play better at home. It’s good to get this win and win the first conference game. I can take a lot from it and I’m looking forward to this talk with the team. But we’ve got to continue to improve in some areas.”

After playing to a 0-0 stalemate in the first half, the Tigers came out and asserted their will on the game in the second half. The pressure finally paid off with less than 20 minutes left to play as Saorla Miller got on the end of a nice ball from Sarah Hagg and did the rest herself to put the Tigers in front. And less than six minutes later the Tigers got some insurance off a corner kick as Anna Hauer poked it on across the line after a goal mouth scramble.

North Texas is one of the new members that was added to the American Athletic Conference and Coach Monaghan was not surprised that they were able to give the Tigers the battle they did.

“They’re the consistently best team coming into our league out of the new teams. They’ve won a lot of championships. So you have to give them credit. Their style of play makes it very difficult. But that’s not an excuse. We had a game plan and we weren’t great with it. We made it more difficult on ourselves than we felt we should have. But at the end of the day, 2-0 and shut this team out…there’s a lot of positives with that.”

He then elaborated on the unique challenge of preparing to play a new conference member.

“You prepare for them just like anybody else, just breaking video down and whatnot. The schedule they played was a bit tricky with their results. There were some things that they did and their athleticism that maybe I probably didn’t give them as much credit, but I knew they were going to be a really hard team to play against because, again, this is a team that’s had a lot of success and won a lot of championships.”

Just how many championships has North Texas won? Well from 2011 to 2019 they won every conference championship except one, missing out on the trophy in 2013. And the combination of their success plus the success the Tigers have had lately meant that Coach Monaghan knew they were in for a fight.

“It wasn’t our best performance but winning’s not easy and we’ve got a big target on our back. Usually we’re going to get other teams best game, especially in this league for what we’ve done in the past. There are no easy games.”

When asked how important it was to start conference play off with a win, Monaghan didn’t hesitate.

“Massive. Massive. Massive. Because you don’t want to put all this work in to put yourself in a good position and then lose the momentum. It’s very hard to get to the top but it’s very easy to get knocked down with the blink of an eye. We pulled this one off and we’re trying to get better from game to game. But to be honest I don’t know that we got better with this game. Now, we were forced to play against a different style team so I like that challenge. This style was a little bit different than what we’ve seen all year so I’m glad that we’re able to get the win but I think there’s still some things we could have done to make it just a little bit easier on ourselves.”

The next game for the Tigers is this Sunday out at the Billy Murphy Track and Soccer Stadium at 7pm against UT-Martin.