The Boston University women's soccer team ended the first half of its season in style as they avenged an NCAA tournament loss to the University of Connecticut by defeating the Huskies last weekend. The postgame feelings were good, but the outlook was the same: there was still more work to be done.
"We start our second season now," said BU coach Nancy Feldman.
The Terriers (5-5-0) will take the first step to achieving their goal of a fourth straight America East title by hosting the University of New Hampshire Sunday at 1 p.m. at Nickerson Field.
It will be the stepping-stone to a goal that on paper looks simple, given BU's early season performance. While conference rivals have stumbled against weaker teams, the Terriers have held their own during a grueling non-conference schedule that included matches against five nationally ranked sides. The road to another top AE finish should theoretically be a cakewalk.
BU only needs to look at recent history to know that this is not the case. In 2006, then-No. 20 BU fell short against University of Hartford in the conference finals. BU will look to prevent this from happening again and start off on the right foot against a middling University of New Hampshire (3-4-2) side.
"Starting now we're 0-0-0 in conference play," Feldman said. "All that we've done we have to build on instead of just resting on it because it all doesn't matter going into conference play."
Feldman hopes the team's offense will continue its form of late. In three out of their past four games, the Terriers have scored three goals per contest. Indeed, BU seems to depend on an in-form attack force to take control early. The Terriers have scored a total of 15 goals in their five victories while putting only two in the net in their five losses.
A wide range of scorers has helped keep the offense from fizzling out. After largely depending on graduate student forward Lisa Kevorkian early in the season, BU has started receiving goals from a variety of sources. Junior forward Jessica Luscinski has caught fire of late, scoring three goals in four games while three others have netted their first goals of the season in the same time frame.
"I think it's awesome that we can show that we have a bunch of players that can all contribute in many different ways," Luscinski said. "It makes us, as a team, totally dangerous and it makes us harder to play against."
The team hasn't done a bad job keeping the ball out of the net either. Freshman goalkeeper Kelly King was named last week's AE Rookie of the Week. Her tandem with junior Alice Binns has four shutouts on the season. The defense, anchored by senior back Corie Halasz and junior back Lina Cords, has done a good job of making things easy for their goalies.
On the opposing side, UNH comes into Boston having just halted a four-game losing streak with a victory over Bryant University. The Wildcats are led by sophomore forward Drea Nogueira, who has three goals on the year. Seven other players have contributed one goal apiece.
With this game, BU will look to establish a stronghold on the AE top spot. A strong team-wide contribution should ensure it starts off its "second season" the right way.
"I think we have a lot of technical players, a lot of creative players, a lot of people that just have the ability to have a huge game when we get into the attacking third," said Luscinski.</p>
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
