Women's soccer's miscues make for another loss at Duke

DURHAM, N.C. – Brian Pensky stood on the field Sunday at Koskinen Stadium, unable to find the words to explain how he felt about his team.

Forty minutes earlier, the coach of the Terrapins women's soccer team watched the clock expire in a 3-1 loss to No. 6 Duke, the latest in a line of heartbreaking losses for the No. 15 Terps. As he surveyed the Blue Devils' empty field, he recounted his team's squandered opportunities in a voice just above a whisper.

"Bottom line for us, if we want to do anything this fall, we've to got to be mentally and physically sharper than we were in that second half," Pensky said. "We don't help ourselves, but now all of a sudden, there's some adversity and I think we just felt sorry for ourselves and we didn't try to fight and fight through the adversity and grab the game back."

Was it discouraging, then, for Pensky to have to tell his team, one that returned 10 seniors from the winningest squad in program history and was once ranked No. 3 in the nation this season, that it needed to address its approach 17 games into its season?

"You wonder if …" said Pensky, his voice trailing off. "Yes."

A variety of miscues that were concentrated in the final 45 minutes of play plagued the Terps on Sunday. The Blue Devils' first and third goals came courtesy of an off-guard Terps defense. On its first score, Duke quickly restarted play after a foul, and the Terps' backline was caught walking back as the Blue Devils ran past them. On the third, many Terps slowed down to appeal what they believed was an offside call on a Duke ball served deep into the Terps' end.

"It's just concentration, I think it comes down to," said midfielder Lydia Hastings, who scored the Terps' only goal in the loss. "We just can't keep focus in the second half. It's just little moments where you lost a player or you fall asleep for a second and players are through our backline and we don't pick them up. It's just little moments like that where we need to be clicked on for the whole entire game, not just the majority of it."

Those lapses in concentration have amounted to tallies in the Terps' loss column this season. An own goal Sept. 22 against Boston College in the final moments of regulation led to an overtime loss, and the Terps couldn't put away Miami early in an eventual 2-1 defeat Oct. 16.

While the Terps have allowed teams to mount comebacks in three of their four losses on the season, they have only one come-from-behind victory themselves, a 2-1 victory over Virginia Tech at Ludwig Field. With a projected ACC Tournament slate that becomes increasingly daunting with each loss, Pensky knows the possibility his team will have to play, and win, from behind is very real.

"As we've discussed, from here on out, if we want to win games like this, we're going to be down again and we're going to have adversity and we're going to have tough moments," Pensky said. "How are we going to deal in those tough moments? If we're going to do anything this fall, we've got to be able to deal with difficult situations both in a physical and a mental way."

At the beginning of the season, Thursday night's game at Ludwig Field against No. 8 North Carolina could have been projected as one between two squads jockeying for a No. 1 seed in the ACC Tournament. Instead, the Terps will be playing just for the opportunity to make the eight-team field.

"We're just going into Thursday," Hastings said. "We're planning for a long season. We knew we were going to have a long season from the beginning, so we're just going to go into the same way we always go into it, thinking we're going to win, knowing we're going to win and knowing we're going to have success down the road."

dgallen@umdbk.com