Soccer Watch

The Austin Aztex beat Minnesota, 2-0, Saturday to retake first place in the United States Soccer Federation Division 2 with less than a month left in the regular season. Both goals were by Eddie Johnson, on inch-perfect feeds from Jamie Watson. The Aztex continue to carry some nagging injuries, but they're also bolstered by a couple of recent signings, and this week they're away on a tough road stretch – three games in eight days: at Puerto Rico (Sat., Sept. 11, 7:05pm), Tampa Bay (Thu., Sept. 16, 6:30pm), and St. Louis (Sat., Sept. 18, 7:10pm) – before their last home game (Sat., Sept. 25, 7:30pm) against St. Louis. You can watch all road games at www.austinaztex.com... Aztex playoff tickets are now on sale; the opening game will be 7:30pm Saturday, Oct. 9... The Aztex won the Austin Chamber of Commerce Community Relations Award last week for the second straight year for their work supporting charities, educational and fitness initiatives, and more. See www.austinaztex.com for info on a few current projects they're preparing.

The United Soccer Leagues on Wednesday announced that they'll restructure their current First and Second divisions into a single property next year: USL PRO. At least nominally, the Aztex are still part of USL-1 – though at this point they may be the only team left under that banner – and owner Phil Rawlins was at the USL meeting in Orlando as we went to press. Meanwhile, as reported last week, all the other teams in the Aztex's current league, USSF D-2, have applied for sanctioning for next year as the North American Soccer League, or NASL. The U.S. Soccer Federation will sort this all out shortly after the end of this season, either sanctioning one league or the other as the official Division 2 (one level below Major League Soccer), or taking the league under its direct management, as it has this year. See more about this on the Chronicle Sports blog, the Score, austinchronicle.com/thescore.

The UT Longhorns got goals from five different players in the second half to beat Navy, 5-1, Friday night – including a first of the year from junior Stacey-Ann Smith, a 400-meter track All-American – then on Sunday got a first career goal from sophomore Kristin Cummins to edge UC-Riverside, 1-0. The 4-0-1 Horns have 12 goals for the season from nine different players. They're in Virginia this week, taking on Virginia and William & Mary; next home game is Sept. 20 against BYU.

Just a handful of upsets in the opening weekend of Euro2012 qualifying in its new format of Friday-Tuesday games. Portugal got off to a terrible start: a 4-4 home draw to Cyprus and a 1-0 loss at Norway. France lost at home to Belarus but came back Tuesday with a 2-0 win in Bosnia. Lithuania upset the Czech Republic. But most of the heavyweights – England, Italy, Spain, Holland, Sweden, Turkey, and Ireland (!) – came through with maximum points (though Spain lost a rousing 4-1 exhibition game to Argen­tina Tuesday). The next games are Oct. 8 and 12, with group play continuing into next fall.

Some good news: The 33 Chilean miners who've been trapped under the Atacama desert for over a month were able to watch a live telecast of Chile's friendly with Ukraine on Tuesday, thanks to a fiber optic line dropped into the mine. Chile lost, 2-1.