NAIA NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS SECOND ROUND
No. 13 SOU (17-2-3) vs. No. 4 Rio Grande (Ohio) (19-0-0)
11 a.m. Monday | OC Great Soccer Park Stadium | Irvine, California
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One thing Southern Oregon won't have to worry about is getting cheated out of top-notch competition in its introduction to the NAIA Men's Soccer National Championship final site.

Seeded 13th, the Raiders (17-2-3 overall) will play the first of eight second-round games at 11 a.m. Monday against No. 4-seeded Rio Grande (Ohio) at OC Great Soccer Park in Irvine, Calif. The Red Storm (19-0-0) held the No. 1 spot in the final NAIA Top 25 coaches' poll and is the only one of the 16 remaining teams to have previously won a national title, most recently doing so in 2015 before making it back to the final game a year later.

HOW THEY GOT HERE: Both teams qualified for the national field with automatic berths; the Raiders got theirs by taking the Cascade Conference regular-season crown with an 11-0-2 record, and the Red Storm won the River State Conference regular-season and tournament championships. To get to the final site, they had to go through the NAIA Opening Round on Nov. 17.

SOU advanced by winning a 1-0 thriller against UC Merced at Raider Stadium. The lone score was netted in overtime, where in the 96th minute Esteban Castaneda's corner kick resulted in an own goal. The Raiders didn't allow a shot on goal all day, and after halftime they had advantages of 14-1 in shots and 9-1 in corner kicks.

In its Opening Round affair, Rio Grande defeated Lawrence Tech (Mich.) 4-0 with four second-half goals from four different players. They were blanked in the first half for just the second time this season but came away with their NAIA-leading 16th shutout.

WHAT'S NEXT: The SOU-Rio Grande winner will play a quarterfinal game at 11 a.m. Wednesday against either No. 5 Missouri Valley (14-5-3) of the Heart of America Athletic Conference or No. 12 Spring Arbor (Mich.) (17-4-1), the Crossroads League champion. Missouri Valley lost last year's national title game in double-overtime against Wayland Baptist (Tex.), and Spring Arbor is at the final site for the second time in three seasons.

SOU would play a semifinal game at 4 p.m. Friday, and the title game is slated for 6 p.m. Saturday.

CASCADE CONFERENCE NOTES: The CCC was perfect in the Opening Round as No. 15 Corban won a 3-2 overtime game against Arizona Christian and Rocky Mountain (Mont.) pulled off a 3-2 upset at No. 6 Hastings (Neb.) – resulting in three conference squads at the final site for the first time ever. Prior to that day, only four CCC teams had advanced past the Opening Round in the last decade. The CCC has produced two quarterfinalists in its history: Rocky in 2015 and Evergreen (Wash.) in 2004. No CCC team has ever reached the semifinal round.

ABOUT RIO GRANDE:

• Under 30th-year head coach Scott Morrissey, the Red Storm is in the tournament for the 18th consecutive season and won championships in 2003 and '15. Morrissey is a three-time NAIA Coach of the Year and has pulled from all over the world to build the program. His latest roster includes two Americans, neither of whom see regular time.
• URG leads the NAIA in goals and has outscored opponents 106-5 with a 244-45 difference in shots on goal. Three of those goals were allowed in one game – the River States tournament championship against West Virginia Tech, which resulted in a 4-3 overtime victory.
• Senior Mitchell Osmond, a center-back from Sydney, Australia, was the River States Player of the Year after leading the Red Storm to 16 shutouts.
• Freshman forward Nicolas Cam Orrellana of Santiago, Chile, owns a team-high 21 goals, the eighth-most in the NAIA. Englishman Harry Reilly, a senior forward, has 13 goals and 17 assists, ranking third in the NAIA in assists per game (1.1).
• URG was upset in last year's Opening Round, 5-4 against Cardinal Stritch (Wis.).

BRIEFLY:

• SOU still has the longest active unbeaten streak in the NAIA at 20 games. The Raiders have only trailed once – for a total of 13 minutes – during the streak.
• Nineteen Raiders have scored goals and 11 have punched in game-winners for the Raiders. Noah Addie (10 goals, 1 assists) and Mitchell Pinney (6 goals, 5 assists) lead the team in points and have three game-winners each.
• SOU features the last two CCC Defensive Players of the Year: juniors Michael Miller (2018) and Wyatt Zabinski ('17). Zabinski has the second-best goals allowed average (0.4) in the NAIA, and the Raiders' 15 shutouts are second only to Rio Grande.
• First-year coach Davie Carmichael earned his 50th collegiate head-coaching victory against UC Merced. He picked up the first 33 at Lake Erie College, an NCAA Division II school in Ohio.

CARMICHAEL ON RIO GRANDE: "Rio are a quality team made up of international players who come from strong playing pedigrees and who have experience playing at this stage of the tournament. We know that they make very few mistakes and play the game with a sense of urgency. We are going to have to be at the top of our game to advance but we will enter the match with confidence and be ready to compete."