Guerrieri speaks on returning production, new additions to 2024 squad

In less than two weeks, Aggie soccer will begin Texas A&M’s 2024-25 athletic year with a pair of exhibition games before the season kicks off. On Monday’s edition of TexAgs Radio, head coach G Guerrieri spoke about his 2024 squad and what’s ahead. 

Key notes from G Guerrieri interview

• So, the players are pretty much all back in town now, but they officially report this coming Sunday. We also start our first training session a week from tomorrow. Our first exhibition game will be here at home and will be free for anyone to come. It is on August 3.
   
• Then we are going up to Dallas to play SMU on August 8, and then the season around the country kicks off on August 15 when we play Lamar in Beaumont. They had a great year. They’re coming off a couple of championships in the Southland Conference.
   
• Nathan Kogut is a College Station boy and a former assistant of ours is the head coach for the Cardinals. He’s done a wonderful job over there. We’re going to go to their place, which can be a snake pit, so we’re hoping we don’t walk into it.
   
• They beat a top-15 team last year with Xavier, so that would be a really good challenge for us as the first game of the season. The following week, we are coming back here for our home opener on August 21, and then we have the Fish Camp game on August 24.
   
• It’s odd because this is the last COVID-19 year. In 2020, all of the players that played that year got a do-over. Nobody’s eligibility counted against them. So, this is the last year that is in effect. We have our freshmen through seniors and then our COVID-19 kids. This is the biggest roster I’ve ever had at 32 athletes.
   
• It’s a little bit different, but you also look at some of the transfers we have brought in, and they are really talented players. Our leading scorer last year, Jazmine Wilkinson, was straight out of the portal.
   
• That was one of the big things we thought we needed. We got to find one more goal scorer, so we went ahead and got four. Brie Severns is a striker from the University of Kansas, who we think can be really dynamic. He graduated in three years with a 3.8 GPA.
   
• Allison Lowrey, who played in the Final Four with Rutgers, is another striker. Leah Pirro is an all-conference big-time attacking player out of Grand Canyon. She’s a California kid and is a great compliment to our creative players in the middle of the field.
   
• Kennedy Clark was a freshman this past year at Xavier. She’s a striker, posts up really well, goal scorer and brings people into the game. We have all these players who are legitimate goal-scoring threats on top of the scorers we had last year.
   
• We have two new freshman goalkeepers, along with Grace McClellan, who is returning from last year. The girls who graduated last year are Kenna Caldwell, who is up with Orlando, and Sammy Smith, who is playing professionally in Iceland. 
   
• The whole team is ready to roll. We had a great spring and we think this is a really, really good team, so we are quietly optimistic. A lot of great chemistry within the team. We have two captains in Andersen Williams and Carolyn Calzada.
   
• We’ve been a young team for the last couple of years, but now it’s turning. The next two years will be a senior-dominated team. Even next year will be a team full of older players. MaKhiya McDonald, who’s a senior this year, is a legitimate pain in the neck to defend because of her pace and her ability to beat people one-on-one. 
   
• Of course, on the other flank is Mia Pante. Those two as wingers and us in transition, we’re the best transition team in the country. We just needed the people at the end of the ball. When we were talking to these transfers, we just wanted to show them how we moved in transition, seeing if they could finish on those opportunities. Showing them that and the 12th Man at Ellis Field, they were like, “Where do I sign?”