By Ronnie Woodard

Football is back in Aggieland.

Well, maybe not the kind you first think of here in Texas.

On Friday night, the 12th-ranked Texas A&M soccer team opened their regular season with a 1-0 loss at the hands of the seventh-ranked Duke Blue Devils. For the third time in the last five seasons, the Aggies (0-1) opened play with a top-ten opponent. With Friday’s defeat, the Aggies now sit 1-2 in those games.

“I thought it was a really well played game,” said A&M head coach G Guerrieri. “Hats off to Duke, they’re a heck of a good team. We talked about how this would be a game of who finishes the chances that they get, and they finished theirs while we didn’t finish ours.”

After back-and-forth play for the first 51 minutes of the game, the Blue Devils broke the 0-0 tie on a shot from forward Kim DeCesare. DeCesare took the pass from midfielder Toni Payne and beat A&M goalie Jordan Day to the back post to give Duke the only score of the game.

Although Day gave up the goal, Guerrieri was impressed with her performance as a whole and knows the score shouldn’t fall completely on the shoulders of his junior keeper.

“I thought our goal keeper had a good night,” stated Guerrieri. “We had a couple of little defensive errors that allowed [DeCesare] to get the ball.”

Three newcomers played their first minutes for the Aggies on Friday including freshman Ana Cruz, former A&M tennis All-American Christina Sanchez-Quintanar and freshman Liz Keester. Of the trio, Keester logged the most minutes and recorded two of A&M’s 12 shots on the night.

“I thought she did a good job,” Guerrieri said of his freshman from Tulsa. “She came in and made a good impact.”

The Aggies two best chances to even the score both game in the final minute of the game.

The first came on corner kick from junior Kelley Monogue that Meighan Streight played to the head of Annie Kunz. Kunz made contact with the ball but just missed the game-tying goal over the top of the crossbar.

Finally, in the last six seconds of the contest, Keester narrowly missed redirecting a cross that surely would have made it past Blue Devils goalie Ali Kershner and into the back of the net for the goal.

“[Keester] was about a step off from being able to finish the one in the dying seconds,” said Guerrieri. “That would have made for a pretty dramatic debut.”

While Guerrieri never likes to lose, he knows the team can use the defeat to better themselves for the rest of the season, starting with Sunday’s contest against UTSA at 7 P.M from Ellis Field.

“This is a tough loss because you hate to lose, but it’s something we can learn from,” concluded Guerrieri. “It’s something we’ll be able to look at ourselves with and look at them and take a little from both in order to get better.”