The pregame message was simple.
“Everybody has to play with positive energy,” Arizona head coach Tony Amato told his team before it took the field. “I’ll coach the rest but I won’t coach that.”
Seven minutes later, the Wildcats trailed UTEP 1-0.
The Miners converted on a set-piece. Arizona started with the “opposite” of positive energy.
“We talked about the positive energy and the effort and defending a set-piece comes down to those things,” Amato said. “You gotta be organized, you gotta have effort, and I thought we had a lapse in concentration there and the girl was wide open and she did well to score it.