By Gavin Lindahl
Sports Assignment Editor
Following a 2-0 loss to St. Joseph’s a week ago, the women’s soccer team fell to 1-3 in conference play and 6-8-1 on the season. The Bonnies now sit at 12th in the Atlantic 10 standings, making them the third-worst team in the conference.
The Bonnies have struggled to score goals against conference opponents (nine goals against with only one goal for), but that is not the squad’s only concern. According to Coach Steve Brdarski, slow starts and early goals against have been the team’s biggest fault, as was evident after St. Joe’s game-winning-goal only 2:55 into the match.
“In the first 45 minutes, [St. Joe’s] put a lot of pressure on us. You can’t give up a goal in the first five minutes of the game on the road and start chasing the game – you just can’t,” Brdarski said. “If you look at some of our last five or six games, we’ve lost the ones where we’ve chased after the game early.
On the flip side, Brdarski claims that the squad’s biggest task is dictating the tempo of the game early. Pointing to a pair of wins against Cornell and Duquesne that came before last Friday’s loss, Brdarski feels confident that as long as his squad brings the energy first, they’ll walk away with a win.
“Those two games were completely opposite of the St. Joe’s game; the first fifteen minutes of those two games, we came out and went after those teams,” Brdarski said. “Both of those games, we didn’t give up early goals. We were in command, we were in good positioning, and we were up the field going after them.”
Part of the problem, Brdarski said, is that the team is spending too much time on their own half of the field, which leads to early goals, which then leads to losses. The answer may seem simple – get the ball out – but is not as easy as it may seem.
“Sometimes, it’s tricky. You try to possess the ball, and we do it in our own end. If it’s working, it’s no problem, but if you lose the ball, you allow the other team to counter in on you,” Brdarski said. “It’s a matter of us saying, ‘hey, if we make mistakes, let’s make them up the field in front of their goal — not in front of our own.’ That’s what we did against St. Joe’s, we gave up the ball 25 or 30 yards away from our goal, and it’s a goal against. If we would’ve made that same mistake 30 yards up the field, it wouldn’t have resulted in a goal like that.”
Despite the apparently bleak outlook on the Bonnies’ situation in the A-10, the squad is in a peculiar spot. The Bonnies have played the fewest amount of conference games, so the team still has room to get out of the cellar and into the top eight. The Bonnies will have to do so with little to no wiggle room, however. It’s all about winning now.
The Bonnies have four more conference games before the end of the season, and the first two will both come on the road. The first will be against the 11th-seeded University of Massachusetts at 3 p.m. today, and the second will be against seventh-seeded Rhode Island at 2 p.m.. Brdarski is ready for the challenge.
“Can we go on the road, which is hard to do, and be the aggressor? That’s what we’ll need to do,” Brdarski says. “We definitely have to win at least one of these games; we’re not in a position where we can afford to drop points. Without a doubt, I think we can win these games.”
