Aug 22, 2024
Kari Gibb/MDN MSU head women’s soccer coach, TJ Perez, installs system drills for the team in practice Wednesday, August 21, in preparation for the season.
“I love this time of year!” said MSU women’s head soccer coach TJ Perez. “It is awesome to get back to work and see the players get into town to start practice and get ready to play!”
Minot State University (MSU) returns 18 players from last season- ten of those are seniors. MSU also added ten new players to the roster for 2024.
“We had a lot of new players in 2023,” said Perez. “We didn’t start to sync until later in the year. The last five games we started to see what we had and the last couple of games we outshot the opponents.”
Outshooting the opposition will be part of the goal package for this season. The 2023 team (6-8-4, 3-7-4) scored 16 goals on 206 shots on goal. They averaged 11.4 shots on goal a game. They scored .89 goals per game over the season.
The goal is to have at least 15 shots on goal a game,” said Perez. “Some teams will limit that due to their solid defense while others, we will get 30 shots in those contests.”
The fact that MSU returned so many student-athletes allows the team and coaching to pick up where they left off last season and make progress this season.
“We are already seeing the difference as the players are in the ‘groove’ now as opposed to taking as long as it did last year,” said Perez. “We can now become very specific, very detail oriented in drills, in practice- in film sessions to help them [players] see that moment, that window of opportunity for taking the shot verses hesitating.”
The coaching drills lean on statistical analysis. Taking shots but not finishing them is not helpful. Taking meaningful shots at the right moment gives the shot a better chance of finding the back of the net.
“We would love to have 50-percent of the shots taken find the net,” said Perez. “It is a goal, but the goal has to be set high and then practices need to be detailed in fulfilling that goal to the best of our ability.”
MSU hosts the University of Regina on Friday, August 23, at 5 p.m. and Concordia College from Minnesota on Saturday, August 24, at 3 p.m. in exhibition games that do not count on the schedule. The team follows these two games with one more exhibition against the Magic City Legends on Wednesday, August 28, at 7:30 p.m. before traveling to Nampa, Idaho for the season opening non-conference match at Northwest Nazarene University on Thursday, September 5.
The coaching staff will have a much better idea of how things have developed to start the 2024 season by the end of the week.
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