The Auburn soccer team had a productive scrimmage on Thursday, head coach James Armstrong said, as the coaching staff scrambles to make up for a lost opportunity with the regular-season opener less than a week away.
Auburn saw most of its preseason exhibition at Georgia washed away Wednesday when weather rolled through only 30 minutes into the match. It was one of only two exhibitions Auburn could use in the preseason to try different lineups and settle position battles — before playing for keeps starting Aug. 12 against Clemson.
To try to make up for some of the precious evaluation data lost to the rainout, the Tigers got back out onto the field for an un-scheduled, improvised intra-squad scrimmage Thursday afternoon.
“We had our sports scientists and our sports performance coach out there monitoring the live data on the iPad, and once we got to a certain threshold, we stopped,” Armstrong said. “So it was about 30 minutes, maybe a minute or two underneath.
“But that was good for us to get out there and stretch the legs.”
Auburn has one more preseason exhibition at 5 p.m. Saturday at home with Georgia Southern. Of the two, of course, the Georgia one was circled because it offered the chance for Auburn to test its stuff against SEC competition. Some Auburn players had final exams Thursday, as it’s the end of the school’s second summer semester, which stopped Auburn from being able to stay in Athens to finish the exhibition late Wednesday night or the next morning.
But Armstrong had plenty of takeaways from the half-hour they played: