Arizona soccer picked to finish 10th in Pac-12, but Becca Moros doesn’t give a damn

If there’s anything we’ve already learned about Becca Moros, it’s that she is extremely confident. As a 36-year-old first-time head coach, she understands why people are doubting her ability to lead the Arizona program. She definitely doesn’t agree with them.

When told that her team has been picked to finish 10th in the Pac-12 by the conference’s coaches, she provided quite the sound bite.

“I don’t give a s—t,” she said. “Are you kidding me? I’ve been listening to people sell people short for all the wrong reasons my whole life. It’s part of sports, right? You make stories up to say this person is going to be the best player coming out of college soccer and then in a year and a half they’ve retired and they had no career. So if people actually thought they could predict what was going to happen, it’s just not true. A lot of people also think because I don’t have a coaching experience I can’t head coach, but that’s already not true, either. So I can understand why you know if you’re looking on paper, you might have some opinion but I spent 14 years in the pros. I have things none of these coaches have, so I’m gonna lean on those things, and they’re gonna lean on the experiences they have to make their judgments.”

Arizona hasn’t finished worse than ninth in the Pac-12 since the conference expanded to 12 teams in 2012, but it finished eighth in the 2020-21 season, lost some key players to transfer, including No. 2 scorer Jada Talley, and saw Tony Amato, the winningest head coach in program history, leave for Florida.

Add that to an extremely short preseason, and the Wildcats are undoubtedly in a difficult spot entering Moros’ first season. But they are eager to prove the doubters wrong.

“I’m a competitive person,” Moros said. “If they told me I was gonna finish sixth, I would still be thinking that’s not good enough, either. At the end of the day, we got to do the job we need to do. We need to work hard, keep pushing forward and get a little bit of good luck as well. Because anybody who tells you that they got where they got without luck is full of crap also. ... We didn’t get to choose what happens to us in a lot of situations, so you prepare yourself the best you can and to make sure that the luck is on your side when you have that chance. But yeah, I don’t think we’re gonna finish 10th.”

Full Pac-12 preseason coaches poll

1. UCLA (7) - 116
2. USC (3) - 110
3. Stanford (2) - 106
4. Washington - 85
5. Washington State - 71
6. California - 68
7. Arizona State - 63
8. Colorado - 56
9. Oregon - 40
10. Arizona - 31
11. Utah - 30
12. Oregon State - 16