The Boston University women’s soccer team will take aim at the Crimson of Harvard University Tuesday afternoon at Ohiri Field, as the Terriers vie for their fifth straight win while trying to stifle the No. 3 team in the northeast.
BU (5-3-1, 1-0-0 America East) beat the University of Maryland, Baltimore County on Saturday, 2-0, and has won games against the University of Rhode Island, Fairfield University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst during its current four-game winning streak.
Despite the impressive string of victories, BU coach Nancy Feldman said her team should improve in a number of areas in a game flagged as one of the toughest on this year’s schedule.
‘We have a lot of things to work on,’ Feldman said. ‘Switching the point of attack is key for us and we have to try to get the ball off of one side of the field and get it to the other side. If you get a quick switch, you can unbalance the defense with a three-person attack.’
Feldman pointed to sophomore midfielder Susan Marschall’s 40-yard pass setting up senior forward Rebecca Beyer’s goal in Saturday’s game as an example of how switching the point of attack is done correctly.
‘It can be done in two or three passes, but it has to be done quickly,’ she said.
Crosses are another point of concern for Feldman, who said finishing them would lead to even greater success.
‘We’ve had a ton of chances on cross balls and we’ve come close, but we haven’t been able to finish, and that is something that has to happen,’ she said. ‘We have a lot of forwards who play wide, so we have to be able to get on the other end of it.’
Harvard enters today’s game with a record of 3-3-1, but is still ranked third in the northeast region, a direct result of its difficult schedule. Already this season the Crimson have played three of the top 21 teams in the country the University of Virginia, Stanford University and Penn State University. All three games resulted in one-goal losses for Harvard.
Besides senior midfielder Katie Westfall and senior back Caitlin Fisher, whom Feldman pointed to as players for BU to watch, junior midfielder Alisha Moran leads the team with nine points on a team-high 17 shots. Senior forward Alisa Sato has seven points on two goals and three assists, and goalkeeper Katie Shields has a nearly non-existent 0.48 goals against average while saving nearly 91 percent of the shots that come her way.
‘Harvard’s system is so good that it seems like year after year they do the job,’ Feldman said. ‘It’s been an amazing thing to watch. I have a lot of respect for what they have done over there. And they don’t have a lot of star players, they are just good solid soccer players that play well in Harvard’s system.’
The Terriers are enjoying a string of well-played games themselves, outscoring their opponents 13-3 in their last four outings. BU has also won five of its last six contests.
‘There is much more of a happy spirit in practice and in games when you are coming off a couple of wins and you have some momentum,’ Feldman said. ‘You can’t rest on that, but it makes us feel better about ourselves as a team.
‘We’ve also experienced it the other way,’ she added, undoubtedly referring to when BU went winless in its first three games this season, and went through losing streaks of three and four games last year, scoring one goal in those seven games combined.
After Harvard, the schedule gets no easier for the Terriers, as they play four games in nine days including conference matchups with a much-improved University of Vermont (3-2-2, 0-0-0 America East) squad and a sizzling University of Maine (7-1-0, 1-0-0 America East) team, whose only defeat this season is to Harvard, 3-0.