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PROVO — Last winter was rough for the BYU women’s soccer team.
After a 7-8-4 regular season, the Cougars saw their string of five-straight conference championships snapped.
To make matters worse, they received no benefit of the doubt from the national offices, and were left out of the NCAA Tournament.
The move festered with them.
Barely two weeks after hanging up the cleats, they vowed to return to the postseason.
Welcome back.
BYU (13-4-1) will travel to former Mountain West rival TCU in the opening round of the NCAA women’s soccer tournament Friday at 7 p.m. CST in Fort Worth, Texas. The winner will face the winner of the match between third-seeded Texas A&M and North Texas in the tournament’s second round.
“Obviously last year wasn’t our best year, and that was motivation for us,” said Madie Siddoway Gates, the team’s lone senior and team captain who scored five goals. “We really decided even two weeks after last season what we wanted to do, and we sat down as a team and set goals. One of them was to win the conference.
“Now we’re just moving forward, and focusing on game to game.”
BYU coach Jennifer Rockwood didn’t expect a home game like she often has in the past. The Cougars lost some cachet with the selection committee after last year, and few other local or regional teams were selected to the 64-team field, which didn't leave much room to dream of being a host site — even for one round.
Instead, BYU will face a team it hasn't seen since leaving the Mountain West Conference in 2011. TCU is coming off one of its best seasons since joining the Big 12, and has qualified for the NCAA Tournament each of the past three seasons.
“My memories of TCU are some great battles, but also a great field and a great facility,” Rockwood said. “It’s all far removed by now; I haven’t been there since (Mountain West) conference play, and that was a while ago.”
The Horned Frogs (12-4-3) average just 1.74 goals per game, but hold opponents to just 0.84 scores and are led by a pair of six goal-scorers in Maddy Warren and Kayla Hill.
“They’ve had a great season, one of the best they’ve had (in the Big 12) and they have to be really excited hosting a tournament game,” Rockwood said of TCU. “I feel like we’ve seen some of the top teams in the country, and we’ve played very well … so we’re proud to represent the WCC and BYU.”
Though the Cougars are making their first NCAA berth since 2016, it’s the 19th time in program history they’ve been selected to the postseason tournament. The NCAA Women’s College Cup is scheduled for Nov. 30 and Dec. 2 in Cary, North Carolina, and should feature top-seeded Stanford, Georgetown, Florida State and North Carolina, if seeds hold form.
Among TCU’s defeats is a 3-0 loss at Santa Clara back on Sept. 13. The only other West Coast Conference team in the field of 64, fifth-ranked Santa Clara, will open the tournament as a No. 3-seed against Milwaukee.
Pepperdine, which was the only team to defeat BYU in conference play and finished third in the league, narrowly missed the bracket — a surprise to Rockwood. The Waves (11-6-2) ranked 44th in the NCAA’s official RPI, just one spot below Northwestern, which made the NCAA Tournament despite not earning a bid to the Big 10’s eight-team conference tournament.
“You just can’t rely on other things happening,” Rockwood said after explaining her own team’s failure to reach the tournament last year. “That’s why the goal every year is to win a conference championship: so you don’t have to sit around and see if you are going to be an at-large selection. It’s completely taken out of your hands.”
A potential matchup with Texas A&M would help BYU, too. The Cougars lost to the then-ninth-ranked Aggies 2-0 back on Aug. 24.
But one step at a time, their senior leader cautioned.
“The biggest thing is to be focused on what we’ve done best,” Gates said. “We aren’t changing anything; we’ve been playing well, and we need to be focused on playing loose.”
