A Good Win and a Tough Loss

The men travelled to Lake Forest College on Monday night for our last non-conference match of the season. LFC are members of the tough Midwest Conference and while they're record was not that great, they play a very difficult schedule. We started the game a little flat - it always takes us a while to get used to field turf, but we managed to not give up any goals during the first half. That is the difference between last year's team and this year's team. We have not had a huge upsurge in talent, but we are able to shut teams out - even when we are not playing our best. In 2006, I think we gave up a goal in the first 15 minutes in 3/4's of our games.

The score was 0-0 at half-time, but our men came out very strong at the beginning of the second half. Even though we were controlling play, LF managed to spring a break-away that resulted in their first goal. We did not let down, however and a couple of minutes later, Reinert finished a very nice cross from Hollenbeck and Solarek stuck the ball in the net from the left side off another feed from Hollenbeck. The end of the game was pretty crazy, but we made the final score, 2-1 stand up. This was a good win for us. We have been floundering a bit over that last few weeks as we adjusted our formation after Josh Marino went down for the season with an injury. Our midfield defense is improving and we are retraining some of our bad possession habits that we fell into in blow-out wins over Great Lakes and Lincoln Christian.

The women's team came into last night's match against Marian College with a 5-5 record, 3-2 in conference. MC was also 5-5, 3-3 in conference. A very big game with playoff implications. Unfortunately, we were bit by the "finishing bug". We controlled the match, outshot them (12 shots on goal, 22 total), but could not seem to put anything away. Kutz, Nichols, Jones, Dow, Collogan and others all had great chances, but we could not shake the net. The match went to OT and we controlled play once again, but shortly into overtime a MC player struck a nice ball with the wind that went into the corner of our net, just out of Barb's reach to give them the win.

This is the kind of loss that sticks with you for a few days. Our team has a lot of potential and we look forward to improving even further over the next couple of weeks. - C