For the 17th time this season, the Boston University women’s soccer team triumphed over its opponents, this time during another tense game at Nickerson Field on Sunday.
While the weather was quite a bit colder than the Terriers (17-2-1, 8-0-0 America East) are used to playing in, the women rose up against Binghamton University with a 2-1 win in the America East Conference semifinals.
“We really came to play,” said sophomore forward Madison Clemens. “It was a good game and we really controlled the outcome in the end.”
From the start, BU came out fighting strong, aggressively outplaying the Bearcats (7-10-1, 3-4-1 America East) from both offensive and defensive standpoints.
According to BU coach Nancy Feldman, the team was strong from the very start.
“I think we did a good job at the beginning, trying to create the tempo,” Feldman said. “And we really had to keep our tempo and that’s not an easy thing to do, to have a level of patience, but then be able to play fast enough to break it down.”
Just less than 20 minutes into the first half, senior midfielder Brittany Heist forged her way up the far side and, with an assist from freshman defender Ariana Aston, scored the first goal of the match for the Terriers.
“[Heist has] been playing great,” Feldman said. “[It was a] great goal, she does a great job of possessing and moving the ball at midfield and being dynamic. She’s been doing great.”
Following Heist’s lead, Clemens tallied another goal for the Terriers later on in the first half with an assist from sophomore midfielder Kylie Strom.
Clemens gave much credit to her teammate in making it happen.
“Kylie was the outside forward and she was coming in, and I was playing center forward,” Clemens said. “I just overlapped her as fast as I could and she played a great ball.”
As the game progressed into the second, the Bearcats caught the Terriers by surprise with a sudden second wind and a goal of their own from forward Sarah Furminger.
“I thought we were going to have a little more of the advantage in the second half with the wind and also because I knew they were going to have to extend their pressure,” Feldman said. “But it didn’t really flow very well for us in the second half. We were kind of fighting it a little bit and they scored on a situation we could have done a bit better on.”
The Terriers buckled down on defense, holding the Bearcats scoreless for the final 25 minutes, solidifying the 2-1 win and a perfect regular season conference record.
“I thought we did a really good job for the last fifteen minutes in the game to manage a 2-1 lead and do it in a pretty controlled and confident, composed way,” Feldman said. “I was pleased with that and I’m not sorry now that we had that experience because I think that will help us moving forward.”
Missing from the field today was senior midfielder Jessica Luscinski. After being consistently present since an injury earlier this season, Luscinski was out with a case of pneumonia, which Feldman is hoping will be all taken care of by the end of this week.
Up next for the Terriers is their fifth-straight appearance in the America East finals, to be played at Nickerson on Saturday afternoon against the winner of the other semifinals matchup, the University of Hartford or the University at Albany.
“We just have to maintain focus this week, stay healthy, get some good practices in,” Heist said. “If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll get the win.”
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.
