Cougars women’s soccer dominates first season in new division

Zafir Nagji, Sports Editor

The Mount Royal University Cougars women’s soccer team played their final season in the Pacific Division of Canada West in 2024, missing the playoffs by just one game. However, there were still many bright spots on the team, including the talent of their rookies, solid coaching, great goalkeeping, and some of the best strikers in the country.

Transferring to the Prairie Division in 2025, the Cougars posted a 10-3-1 record, good for second in the division behind only the University of Calgary Dinos. That came despite key injuries to Julia Makoloski and Ruby Szautner, who made huge impacts in their 2024 rookie campaigns.

That qualified them to host a first-round playoff game for the first time ever at Mount Royal Field 2 against the UBCO Heat.

Despite going down by a goal, the Cougars fought their way back behind star midfielder Tamara Djurisic’s signature set-piece heroics and rookie winger Darian Pluhator’s physics-defying chip shot to advance to the Canada West semi-finals, where they would face the UBC Thunderbirds in Vancouver. 

There, Djurisic became the only player to score on the Thunderbirds in 2025, but MRU took a tough 2-1 loss. That qualified them for a bad-weather bronze medal game against the University of Calgary Dinos, and despite being the only team to hand the Dinos a loss in the regular season, the Cougars took a 3-0 loss. 

According to Ella Tait, though, there was still plenty to celebrate about their season as they rallied around their captain, Isabella Chirico, in her final season.

“It’s been an unreal run with the team this season,” Tait said. “It felt like the perfect end to her career as our captain… I think next year we’ll be even better.”

MRU started their season on fire, going six games without a loss to open the year. They suffered their first defeat against one of the best teams in Canada West women’s soccer, the MacEwan Griffins.

They then rattled off four consecutive wins, including three clean sheets, as they battled with the Dinos for superiority in the Prairie Division. Late in the season, they encountered their first losing streak, taking a 0-2 loss to the University of Saskatchewan Huskies and then a 0-1 loss to the Dinos. 

That put them one point behind MacEwan for the second seed in the division, and the top two teams in each division earned home-field advantage in the quarterfinals. Knowing this, head coach Tino Fusco claimed not to have made any playoff travel plans, seeking to defeat the Dinos in a Crowchild Classic clash to end the Cougars’ highly successful regular season on an even higher note.

Only one goal was scored in the tightly contested match, and it came on the boot of MRU’s supersonically speedy sophomore striker Dany Juarez, assisted by captain Chirico.

Plenty of Cougars set new highs for themselves over the season, including first-time All-Star keeper Ella Filek and the Cougars’ three-woman back line of Kyla Franks, Sidaly Alcock and Chirico, who combined to allow just 12 goals—the third-fewest of any team in Canada West. 

However, the story of the season started and ended with Djurisic, who co-led the conference with nine goals in 14 games played. She also tied for fourth in assists with five, placing her second in the conference in points with 14. The Serbian sensation took home Player of the Year honours and was selected to be an All-Star, securing the MRU records for most goals in a single game (3), most goals in a single season (9) and most goals in school history (23 and counting) as a third-year player.

After scoring all three of her team’s goals in the third-last game of the regular season against Regina, Djurisic didn’t score in the Cougars’ last two games of the regular season. However, no one was concerned about that narrative for too long, as in her first-ever home playoff game, Djurisic scored the game-tying goal on a 76th-minute free kick. Pluhator put the finishing touches on the game to beat the UBCO Heat 2-1, and the Cougars were off to Vancouver to take on the UBC Thunderbirds in the semifinals.

Going into the game, coach Fusco gave a simple yet impactful mantra to his team.

“We had one thing that just kept being repeated, it was: ‘why not us?’,” Tait said. “We kept repeating that going into our UBC game, ‘why can’t we score on UBC?’”

And score they did, as after going down 2-0 against the Thunderbirds, Tamara Djurisic found the back of the net in the 69th minute of the game. That made her the only player to score on UBC the entire year, even including the Final, which Tait said, “feels like a huge win to us.”

The Cougars couldn’t complete the comeback as they lost 2-1 to UBC, following that up with a 3-0 loss to the Dinos in the bronze medal game. The Thunderbirds went on to defeat the Trinity Western University Spartans by a scoreline of 2-0, keeping their two-year-long undefeated streak alive and winning back-to-back Canada West Championships.

Despite MRU’s loss, Chirico made sure that Tait and the rest of the team understood the scale of their accomplishments in the 2025 season as they look forward to 2026.

“Getting to the Final Four was just a crazy experience in my fourth year, and we’ve never made it this far before,” Tait said. “Bella kept repeating one word — history. We’ve made history, and there’s more to come from this group.”