Last season, with a playoff spot hanging in the balance, the Royals went 3-1-1 that month to catapult themselves into the fourth and final berth. And although they won their final game of 2018 — the only September game — results around the league eliminated them from the postseason.
Utah was in virtually same situation last month. Sitting in seventh after an abysmal July, the team needed to fix whatever was going wrong, and fix it immediately if it had any hope of reaching the playoffs in 2019. In August, the Royals did just that, going 3-1-1 again to earn the fourth spot in the National Women’s Soccer League standings.