After a dramatic 2-1 road victory over Cal Baptist, the San Diego State men’s soccer team is looking to clinch its first trip to the NCAA Division I men’s soccer tournament in a decade.
The Aztecs will have a serious hurdle though. They must take on the top-seeded Oregon State Beavers in the Pac-12 championship at 6 p.m. Saturday at Paul Lorenz Field in Corvallis.
They already cleared a high hurdle, though, by knocking out Cal Baptist (12-4-2), which led after a goal in the 42nd minute on Nov. 7. SDSU tied it up in the 74th and got the game winner just two minutes later. The Aztecs never looked back.
Turning to Oregon State, the two teams faced each other during the regular season in Corvallis on Sep. 30 and played to a hard-fought 2-2 draw when the Beavers were ranked 21st in the nation.
“We just have a mantra that we are not going to lose,” said SDSU head coach Ryan Hopkins. “There’s going to be ebbs and flows in knockout football games. The reality is they are very good at what they do.”
The Beavers (10-4-4) are hosting the championship as the top seed in the tournament while San Diego State is ranked third. The Aztecs (4-7-9) also will go into the match undefeated in their last five games, having lost just once over their last eight.
Oregon State enters the final having won three of four, including a 3-1 conference semifinal victory over UC Riverside on Sunday.
One of the biggest challenges for Hopkins this season, he said, was that “it was going to take some time because at the beginning we had twenty new players.” San Diego State returned just 17.8% of its minutes played from the previous season – that ranks as the fifth fewest in the nation.
As a result, it was tough going early on.
“We took some hard lessons in non-conference, but I think those things also hardened us and really showed us who we are,” Hopkins added. “I think we got to be one of the hotter teams in the country.”
A victory in the Pac-12 championship means the Aztecs get an automatic berth to the big dance for the first time since 2016 when legendary head coach Lev Kirshner was still at the helm.
That was the same year that SDSU defeated the No. 1 ranked team in the nation, Akron, on a 61st minute penalty kick conversion by redshirt senior Travis Nicklaw.
SDSU finished the 2024 season with a 10-win campaign and a WAC regular-season championship under Hopkins, but ended up losing to San Jose State in the WAC Tournament and missing out on an automatic bid or an at-large selection to the 48-team NCAA field.
Entering this season, Hopkins had led the Aztecs to a Top 25 national ranking in three of the previous five years and also won WAC Coach of the Year honors.
He knows his team’s strengths vs. Oregon State’s.
“Oregon State has a very distinct style of play,” said Hopkins. “I think we’re probably slightly better at them making adjustments, where they kind of just stick to their DNA and do what they do well.”
