Top-seeded Texas A&M cruises past Georgia

ORANGE BEACH, Ala. -- Top-seeded Texas A&M scored a goal early in each half and cruised to a 3-0 victory against eighth-seeded Georgia in the quarterfinals of the Southeastern Conference Soccer Tournament on Wednesday at the Orange Beach SportsPlex.

The Aggies, who were presented with the 2014 SEC regular-season trophy prior to Wednesday's match, out-shot the Bulldogs 16-5 in the match.

"I thought it was a well-played game," Texas A&M head coach G. Guerrieri said. "Georgia really did a great job of keeping possession and did a good job of trying to open things up, but I was really pleased with the way that we defended. We really limited them to very few chances on goal, so Jordan [Day] didn't really have to make any big saves. It's a pretty good indicator if your goalkeeper isn't having to make many saves of how things are going to go. We had some great goals. All three of our goals were high, high class."

Texas A&M got on the board in sixth minute when Annie Kunz fed Bianca Brinson on a breakaway to give the Aggies an early 1-0 advantage that they would take into intermission. Out of the locker room, Kunz scored her sixth goal of the season in the 46th minute to extend Texas A&M's lead to 2-0. The Aggies iced the match when a Meghan Streight header gave Texas A&M its third goal of the night in the 61st minute.

"Georgia is a team that I would expect to be in the NCAA Tournament and they're a team that you don't want to get any traction," Guerrieri said. "They've had it rough. They had to play at our place last Thursday and then they had to play here on Monday night. We wanted to try to take their legs and take a little bit of belief out of them by trying to score early and score as much as we could."

Texas A&M (16-6-2) advances to face the winner between fourth-seeded Missouri and fifth-seeded South Carolina in Friday's first semifinal match at 3:30 p.m. CT on the SEC Network.

Georgia drops to 10-7-2 with the loss.

"Texas A&M is very good and we were going to have to be at our very best today," Georgia head coach Steve Holeman said. "You could just see the fatigue in our players and, unfortunately, we gave up an early goal in each half and that did us in."