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Women's Soccer Coaches Corner I knew this week would be a good test to see how far we had come since Alabama Huntsville(UAH), our first game of the season. Lincoln Memorial(LMU) is a stronger Division II team then UAH, and I was interested to see if we could step up in our mentality. An outing against them where we only lost by a few goals would be a major accomplishment. Unfortunately, it was clear from the start that we are not there in terms of our mentality. I wrote last week that we dominated Union and won 1-0 in overtime, and if we had done better with our chances could have won by 2 or 3 goals. LMU beat Union in the first game of the season 5-0 and had 44 shots. At halftime of our game against LMU, it was 8-0, and they had 17 shots. It is tough to tell the reason of such domination, and I am really not in the business of trying to see why we cannot step in a game like that. It was just embarrassing to our program to lose like that. I just look at our play and see things that we did not execute and address. We were not disciplined in our defending even though we have gone over it thoroughly so set off the next two days to work on our discipline. What is going on in our heads differs tremendously from player to player. And they would probably each give you a different reason why we did not step up. I thought for Saturday’s game that we would come out a very hungry side. However, we came out a bit tentative which I think is a direct result of taking a loss like we did on Wednesday. It is one thing to lose like that in the first game of the season against UAH, but I think taking a loss like we did against LMU, 5 games into the season, rattles the confidence. As the first half went on we started to look to gain some more confidence, and our play started to pick up. I thought that this would just continue throughout the game, and we would play like ourselves again. To be fair, Spalding was a much stronger side then last year, and one lesson to be learned is that teams change from season to season. We beat Spalding last year 8-1. They had all new starters beside one and were much improved. As our play picked up in the first half, we started to generate some scoring opportunities and finished one by Rebecca Rube. We were first to get on the scoreboard even though Spalding had carried play for the first 15 minutes of play. We carried the play for the next 10 and were fortunate enough to score from it. Our play continued to improve, and it looked like we just might be able to get a good result against a much improved team. To their credit, they showed a lot of determination and were able to regain control of the game and scored with 10 minutes left in the half. It was a pretty good half, and I felt if we could continue to carry the play we would win. However, in the 2 nd half they would carry most of the play and it looked like any second they would score. Ands they did and deserved to score. Even after the goal, we could just not carry any play. They worked extremely hard and were a smart team and deserved to win the game. In the 2 nd half, the game was won and lost in the midfield. Our midfielders could not keep possession nor win 50/50 balls, and Spalding did a great job of it. We are just going to have to pick ourselves up. In athletics, no opponents feel sorry for you, and we cannot feel sorry for ourselves. Our execution and discipline was a direct consequence of our results this past week. We are going to have to start focusing more in training in holding each other accountable for our play. That is where games are one and lost and the reason you spend more time training then playing games. We have a lot of players getting on each other in the game but not enough in training. There are still 12 games left in our season, and our goal of winning 12 games is attainable and making playoffs but we will have some strong efforts like we had in our 3 wins. This week both matches are at home. Wednesday we take on Trevecca Nazarene at 4:30 and Saturday we play Berea at 2pm. Until next week.
August 27, 2006 Corner |
