San Diego State men’s soccer had a night-long battle, earning a 1-1 draw against city rival University of San Diego on Saturday, Oct. 14 at Snapdragon Stadium.
The stadium, which opened last fall is home to the football team, has seen both the men’s and women’s soccer teams start a tradition of playing one match per season over there.
“It’s awesome, the stadium is even cooler down here on the field,” said defender Tristan Viviani. “It’s even cooler when there are a bunch of fans here.”
This year the men’s program set a new attendance record of 3,632 at the venue on Saturday night. Last year they faced the then-No. 2 Washington, dropping a 2-0 decision before a crowd of 2,769.
The team gave out free t-shirts and also honored alumni who played in the program years past.
“I’m so proud of the city for showing up, and obviously I think we have a great soccer culture and it’s going to continue to grow,” said head coach Ryan Hopkins.
Viviani had his first start of the season and scored the only goal for the Aztecs in the 53rd minute. It was his first goal of the season and second goal as an Aztec — both goals being scored against USD — drawing assists from Seth Clark and Beto Apolinar.
“Tristan is a big time player… I challenged him a lot,” Hopkins said. “It’s a play we talk about all the time, we want the wingers constantly running diagonally. We talked about it at halftime…when we execute those things, we can be really, really dangerous.”
For Viviani, it was only a matter of making a run.
“We were talking about it in the locker room, diagonal runs behind their outside back and I just did exactly what the coach said,” he said. “Credit to him and then credit to myself, it was a good finish. But the team worked hard and it was a tough time.”
USD was able to earn the draw when midfielder Mason Tunbridge scored a goal in the 74th minute to tie the match, assisted by defender Ethan Ware and forward Steven Ramirez.
Viviani and Hopkins had different takes on how the match went against USD.
“Getting scored on was a con…another con is tying the game that I feel like we should have won and we just got to do better,” Viviani said. “The pro was that I got my first goal, good personal stuff for me.”
Hopkins saw the positives about drawing against another side in the top 30 in RPI.
“We had to do too much last ditch defending in my opinion…Not getting the clean sheet was number one and then not figuring out a way to think,” he said. “I don’t think we were dangerous enough with our possession, I thought that we were really sloppy with the ball, a lot of one-touch turnovers, so those are the things you’ve got to fix.”
The Aztecs will be heading to Los Angeles to face UCLA at 7 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 20 at Wallis Annenberg Stadium.
Now that non-conference play is over and the Aztecs six remaining matches will be in the Pac-12, Hopkins wants to change things up.
“I thought our details still weren’t good enough tonight in certain moments, and just being focused for 90 minutes,” Hopkins said.
The Aztecs will be back home at the Sports Deck when they play against Oregon State on Thursday, Oct. 26 at 4:30 p.m.
“I think our group has a lot of resilience and even moments when we’re maybe not playing as well as we should,” Hopkins said. “I do take a lot of solace in our group and our willingness to fight and be resilient.”
