As the seasons begin to change and the weather gets colder, fall sports teams have started ramping up their play in preparation for the postseason. Knowing this, the Boston University women’s soccer team will look to continue its recent good form in a pair of America East conference matches this week. The Terriers will first travel to University of Maryland Baltimore-County on Thursday before returning home to face Stony Brook University on Sunday.
BU (6-5-0, 1-0-0 AE) has settled into midseason form lately, rolling off its first three-game winning streak of the year. In their last match, the Terriers pulled off one of their most impressive displays of the season: defeating the University of New Hampshire by a 2-0 score.
“I think that the team felt good about the win and how they played,” said BU coach Nancy Feldman. “We all agree that we should have put the game away earlier with the amount of shots we had. We did get confidence and momentum going so we have to keep building and improving on what we’ve been doing.”
The team’s first test will come against a UMBC(2-7-1, 1-0-0) squad that has been struggling for a large part of the year. After going winless in their previous eight games, the Retrievers finally stopped the bleeding with a 2-0 victory away at the University of Vermont. BU will look to replicate the results of the last meeting between the two schools, a 5-0 thrashing at Nickerson Field.
“Next game, we will look to build on everything,” Feldman said. “Now it’s on the road so it takes a little more to accomplish a victory. I think we are pretty balanced in our position, but ultimately it comes out to whether or not you play your best soccer.”
UMBC is led on offense by a trio of players. Freshman Amy Savage and seniors Sandra Vacarino and Christine Sadowski enter the game with two goals apiece. In goal, freshman Lauren Kadet has played all but 90 minutes of the entire season, stepping up with a 1.62 goals-against-average.
Moving ahead to Sunday, BU will face a Stony Brook(1-7-2, 0-0-1) squad that has also hit a rough patch. The Seawolves did not gain a victory until their ninth game of the year with a 4-1 win over Manhattan College.
“They are two very aggressive, competitive teams,” Feldman said. “They’ve had some close results against good teams and have some attacking players. We need to control the tempo and be aggressive in attack. It takes every player to be good at keeping the ball, playing with good speed and then moving on the field.”
There is a little bit of revenge to be had in that game as the Seawolves gave BU their only conference loss of 2009 by the score of 2-1. The Terriers did get even in the playoffs, gaining a 2-1 win of their own over Stony Brook in the AE semifinals.
Continued good play by BU’s key players will be essential if the winning streak is to continue. Graduate student forward Lisa Kevorkian has been a stellar addition to the team, netting seven goals and two assists on the way to a pair of AE Player of the Week awards. On the other side of the field, goalkeeping duo Alice Binns and Kelly King will look to add to their conference-leading total of five shutouts.
The games this weekend represent a good chance for the Terriers to put some distance between them and other teams in AE. While a slip up would not be catastrophic this early in conference play, the sustained momentum is not something BU should easily give up.
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.
