Aggies try to score national title Team heads to San Antonio as Big 12 No.l seed Soccer fighting for campus recognition I t is said that anything done more than once at Texas A&M is a tradi tion. If that is the case, then win ning seasons and being ranked in the top ten have become mainstays for the Texas A&M soccer team. The 1997 regular season was no different for the Aggies. A&M fin ished 16-2-0 and ranked 4th in the nation. With the Big 12 Tournament and NCAA National Championship Tournament approaching, the Ag gies are poised to capture their first national championship. The question is not so much if the Aggies can bring home a national ti de, but what it will take to do so. “We need to have determination if we are going to win the national championship. As a team, we work well when we work as one unit and play as a team. In soccer you play well as a team, or you play bad as a team,” Emily Elias said. “If we want it, it’s ours. With 23 excellent ath letes on this team, it can be ours just like that. But everyone needs to want it.” With each passing season, the Aggies improve their record and national standing. Since the incep tion of I t is the world’s oldest game and perhaps its most popular. Millions of people around the world crowd around televi sion sets and into stadiums to wimess a game called football, or as it is referred to in the United States, soccer. For many, soccer is in the blood and hearts stop on Sunday afternoons when their team takes the field. But in this country and on this campus, soccer is often looked upon as a “secondary sport,” which does not often provide the of fensive scoring that people seem to demand. Here in Aggieland, American Football, yes, the kind played on “sacred” Kyle field, flows through the veins of every “true Aggie.” The sport gets so much attention that it is often easy to overlook the hard work the Texas A&M Soccer Team puts in each day. This hard work paid off last weekend when the sixth-ranked Aggies recorded their 42nd- career shutout. The victory gave A&M its first Big 12 title with a 5-0 victory over Colorado. “I can walk around campus and people will come up to me and say, ‘Oh I’ve been to every single game,’ and you know they are re ally great fans,” senior midfielder Sonia Ibanez said. “But there are the other people who don’t even know we exist.” Junior defender Emily Elias said, “It’s a big deal. We were ranked third in the nation, the highest-ranked team at A&M. I think thatfs something that people at this school should be proud of.” The road has been a long and rough one for the Aggies. In 1977, soccer was initiated at A&M in the form of an intercollegiate club team. After many years of success in club and varsity II status, the team was elevated to full varsity status in November 1992. Five years later, the program is thriving. Things have never looked so good for the Aggies. “It’s gotten better over the years. Atten dance improves with every passing season, now the stadium has lights.things keep com ing one by one,” Ibanez said. “It seems like every season we’re stepping up higher. But we’ve really had to do a lot of work to get any kind of recognition.” With the Big 12 championship on their re sume, hopefully that success will transform into larger crowds, more publicity and most importantly, more respect. Despite many advances the Aggies and their loyal fans have made, an attitude of ap athy still exists among many of the 43,000 students at Texas A&M. Many will look at this title and with a short smile and turn of the head and say, “Oh it’s just soccer.” “As much hard work and dedication that every member of this team puts in, it’s not ‘just soccer’,” Elias said. “It’s a full-time job for everyone out here and it is degrading in a way to think that we work our butts off every day to represent the school and some people think a soccer championship has little value.” Is a soccer championship secondary to, say, a football championship? Perhaps foot- ball draws bigger crowds and more national attention, but the soccer teams puts in the same effort in representing this university as the football team does. The soccer team puts so much time and energy into representing the student body of this school, more students could and should take pride in representing them in the stands. “People talk about us more than ever now, but some people only talk about it and don’t come out to fire games,” sophomore goal keeper Melanie Wilson said. “It’s good to come out to games. Some people think it’s boring, but have never really given it a scholarship NCAA Division I soccer at A&M, the Aggies have compiled an amazing 82-17-3 overall record and have only lost three Big 12 con ference games. The Aggies will be the number one seed in the Big 12 Conference tournament which begins today. The tournament will be played at Blos som Stadium in the Blossom Ath letic Complex in San Antonio. As the number one seed, A&M has a first round bye. In the second round, the Aggies will face the win ner of the Texas/Colorado game on Friday at 7:30. The winner moves on to the championship game on Sunday at 1 p.m. to play ei ther Nebraska or the winner of the Iowa State/Baylor game. “The talent is overflowing on this team, it is just a matter of putting it all together for the duration of the post season. I think right now we are in a great setting. We’ve got the Big 12 tournament and then we hit it with the playoffs right then,” Sonia Ibanez said. “This is the perfect time for us. We’ve got momentum, the intensity