The Boston University womenʼs soccer team may be 8-2-1 overall. It may have beaten ranked opponents in the first half of the season. It may have been ranked itself at one points this season. And it may already lay claim to one victory in the young America East Conference season, the second portion of their schedule.
But that doesnʼt mean much to BU coach Nancy Feldman.
“All of our conference games are competitive,” Feldman said. “Everyone is shooting for the same thing: We all want a spot in the conference tournament championship and the automatic bid it gives you to the NCAA tournament.”
That automatic bid has been owned by BU for the past four seasons, and itʼs something Feldman has indicated the program would like to retain this year. The Terriers head into their second weekend of the AE schedule knowing they are the team to beat.
“Weʼre the team with the target on our back and we can make peopleʼs season–peopleʼs regular season–if they knock us off,” Feldman said.
The Terriers return to Nickerson Field Thursday night at 7 p.m. for a match with the University of Vermont Catamounts. The Terriers will then travel north to Orono, Maine on Sunday to challenge the University of Maine Black Bears.
Both of BUʼs opponents for the weekend opened their respective conference seasons this past Sunday as well. The Catamounts hosted Stony Brook University in Burlington, Vt. and won 1-0, while the Black Bears lost 3-0 at home to the Binghamton University Bearcats.
On the whole, neither team has seen much success so far in the season.
Vermont is 3-5-3 overall and has scored an average of .91 goals-per-game, with a .083 shot percentage. One area the Catamounts do excel in, however, is shots-on-goal as a percentage of shots. Over half of all 120 Vermont shots in their past 11 games have been a goal, something that should keep things exciting for the Terriers, who have held their opponents to a .371 average shots-on-goal percentage.
Feldman said the Terriers hope to limit the Catamounts’ shots by keeping the ball away from Vermont, something she believes will slow their opponent down.
“When they have the ball, weʼre going to be very aggressive in our 1-v-1 defending and weʼre going to hunt the double and weʼre going to compact the space around the ball,” she said.
The Maine (3-4-1) offense is centered around forward Carolyne Nellis, who has four of Maineʼs seven goals this season. The defense is led by Katlyn MacIssac, who was named the America East Player of the Game against Stony Brook, despite the Black Bears’ shutout loss.
Through one of their nine America East contests, BU has been able to escape with the target completely clean, with not even a nick present. The Terriers began conference play this past weekend in upstate New York, where they beat the University at Albany 2-0. Sophomore midfielder Kylie Strom–the teamʼs leading scorer with five goals–contributed the first goal, while freshman standout Taylor Krebs kicked the game winner, her fourth goal of the season.
After the win at Albany, Feldman said she thought her team “played better in the second half,” and the stat sheet for the entire season would concur.
Though BU has so far this season scored an equal number of goals in both halves of gamers (10), the team has taken more shots and been granted more corner kick opportunities in the second half. Feldman says the fact isnʼt that her team is necessarily starting slow, but that it takes a little while for the squad to develop and wear their opponents down.
“Our goal is to wear teams down,” she said. “I feel like we wear them down physically. Hopefully we wear them down with our fitness and our mobility, so they get tired of tracking us.”
Feldman says she isnʼt worried about complacency against conference opponents. She said her players know these games are central to their postseason goals.
“They take it one game at a time and they respect every opponent,” she said. “If we donʼt come ready to play, and play our best, they could end up above us in the standings and get in our way of making the conference tournament.”
“We take it pretty darn seriously.”
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