“Players Only” is a special column written by Harding athletes. In this week’s issue: Bisons senior forward Braeden Grundy discusses the soccer season so far and the upcoming conference tournament.

This season has gone well for soccer from the standpoint of how we were projected to do at the start of the year. At the beginning, we were projected to finish sixth out of eight teams in our conference. When we started playing, we knew we had a special team when we tied Mississippi College, a team that has gone to the NCAA Tournament the past three years. We then got off to a great start in conference, until we got to Fort Hays and lost by a good margin.
At this point in the season, we were in second place in the conference, so we were still happy about where we were. We then went on to lose to Rogers State, but were still in second place. We then played one of our best games against Northeastern State and we got on a roll until we played Ouachita Baptist and things ended up going downhill a little bit.
All we needed to make the conference tournament was to win one game in the next three games. We lost to Ouachita and Northeastern after that, leaving us having to beat Rogers State on senior night in order to make it to the tournament. With the biggest game of the season, our team ended up pulling out the win against a ranked team, which was the first time in Harding soccer history .
Overall, our season has been a great one.There is still the conference tournament to play, so the season is not over, and we could still go beyond all expectations from the beginning of the season.