Summer check-in: Becca Moros believes pro career will play crucial role coaching at UA

Over the past nine days, the Star has examined the state of several of the UA’s men’s and women’s sports on campus, reflecting on the prior season and looking ahead to the 2021-22 slate.

Rounding out our project in checking in with Arizona soccer, led by new head coach Becca Moros, who was hired in June. This is part two of the conversation with Moros about her defining qualities as a coach and what her biggest asset will be for Arizona.

How has your playing career both in college at Duke and professionally for several organizations helped you in becoming a coach?

A: “I definitely think the last 14 years of experiences are going to be more current to what soccer in this country looks like now. Every year as a pro, you have the next generation of top players coming out of college soccer and joining you on your professional teams.

“I feel like those experiences, every year kind of watching players come out, go through that process is probably the most current to what the current level or top level of college soccer in this country is. As a coach, I was working with a bunch of those players that we drafted and also you’re playing against those people on other teams as well.

“College soccer was different when I played than it is now, like very different. The game has changed in this country for the better. I think women’s soccer is exploding right now.”

In what ways are you going to challenge the group of women you’re going to be coaching at Arizona and develop your sense of culture?

A: “The big thing with them is that the challenges and things that we’re going to put out there in practice are going to be really different than things they’ve experienced before. For me, as I’ve watched them and have watched Arizona play in the past, it makes me confident that I have a group of really talented women but I don’t know who is going to respond to the challenges in what ways.

“As a coach that’s always been my philosophy is that you put the challenge out, but you don’t choose who rises to it, right? They choose that. It’s going to be about me challenging them each day and then continuing to challenge them based on where they are and how they respond to challenges.

“And then we move the bar. Each time you reach the bar, I’m going to push it higher so that we’re always striving to get better.”

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What type of identity do you want Arizona to have on the field in terms of the style of soccer being played?

A: “I think some of that stuff is gonna build over time, because you can’t just throw out what the team did well before. You have to build on what they’ve already been successful at and it’ll be a marriage of that and what we grow into becoming.

“What we will be becoming from Day 1 when we start on the field is a positional possession team, meaning we want to take aggressive positions on the field. We’re moving the ball quicker than the other team can respond, we’re going to create numerical advantages to create dominant goalscoring situations. Everything we do in training is about speed of decision-making.

“I encourage a lot of autonomy. I try not to make a ton of rules and restrict players to how they can make decisions because it’s just you making those decisions in a game, there isn’t a coach telling you this or that.”

What is the most valuable asset you will bring to Arizona?

A: “Professional soccer in this country’s women’s game is some of the best in the world. I come directly out of that. I had a huge impact coaching in the pros and my very first year there’ll be a whole bunch of pros coming down to Tucson to train in the offseason.

“But the best of what I do comes from my time in Japan. Anybody who knows the landscape of women’s football in the world knows that the Japanese are one of the tactically most sophisticated countries in the world.

“So I have just this completely different top class exposure to something in a culture and a way of learning that’s just so different from what we do in America. It helped me in terms of carving out advantages, being able to read the game quicker and to think the game differently than other people.

“And I’ve had tremendous success sharing that with players that I’ve coached in New Jersey.”