In the end, Jumbos can't get lucky

The old clich?© says that it's better to be lucky than good. But when you get to the NCAA Tournament, you often need both. While the women's soccer team was not outmatched on the field in Saturday afternoon's second-round game against Keene State, the Jumbos did not get any breaks, and wound up on the short end of a 1-0 score.

"I don't really think we played badly. We got unlucky," sophomore goalkeeper Meg McCourt said. "We had our chances, we just couldn't put it in. That's the story of our season. But this wasn't how it was supposed to end."

Things were going wrong for Tufts from the start.

Already without freshman midfielder Lydia Claudio (stress fracture), the Jumbos also had to do without sophomore defender Alina Schmidt for a third consecutive game. After injuring her back earlier this year, Schmidt re-injured it last week against Conn, and although it was a game-time decision, she ended up sitting. Then, just over ten minutes into the game, sophomore midfielder Sarah Gelb re-aggravated a hamstring injury, and had to come out, leaving the team without yet another key player.

"When we went all the way through to the finals two years ago, I just feel like we were really lucky. We didn't have any injuries, nobody was sick, everything was working out," senior co-captain Alle Sharlip said. "The ball bounced right every single time for us. We were a really good team that season, but we also got lucky, and I feel like we just didn't get the breaks that we got back then".

The weather was not cooperating, either, as a steady rain poured down with a temperature that hovered just above freezing. The Jumbos had played well in the rain earlier this year, posting 5-1 and 4-0 wins over Trinity and Nichols, but the field conditions Saturday were much worse than they were in either of the prior games.

There was no standing water, but the surface was essentially a large mud pit, getting wetter as the rain continued to pour down, and made worse by the Wheaton-Bridgewater State game played earlier that morning.

"It was all mud everywhere," Sharlip said. "Our field on Wednesday (against Nichols) had standing water, which was annoying because the ball would just stop, but today you just took one step and your feet would fall out from underneath you."

That virtually eliminated one of the Jumbos' biggest strengths. The thick mud slowed Tufts' speedy forwards, and players slid around all over the place. As the play became sloppier and sloppier, Keene was able to take advantage of their bigger size, playing a physical game the Jumbos were unable to maneuver around.

"They're a really big, physical team, and they definitely were playing the physical game," Sharlip said. "Normally, we could use our finesse and our skill to get around them, but because the field was crap today, it was really hard to maneuver. I feel like on a different day we could have beaten Keene, but not today. They just got the better of us."

"I would have loved to play that game over again on a dry, normal day, but that's the way soccer goes, and you have to take those as they come," senior midfielder EA Tooley added. "The weather was awful, and the field sucked, but you can't do anything about that."

Even Keene's goal came on a bad break for the Jumbos. In the 57th minute, Owl forward Erin Lester sent a dangerous shot across the front of the net. It missed, and the defense was in position to clear it, but the ball bounced off the wrong way, and went back into the Tufts net for an own goal, the only score of the game.

But the Jumbos were quick to point out that, while these may have been reasons that factored into the final outcome, they are by no means excuses.

"It's a disappointing loss. I personally believe that we were much better than Keene, but we did everything we could and came up short," senior co-captain Cara Glassannos said. "You can't blame it on the outstanding factors. We didn't really catch any breaks today, and we didn't put it away when we had our chances."

"It was a tough day," coach Martha Whiting added. "The conditions were horrible, but both teams have to play in it, so it's not something you can use as an excuse. But I do think that on a dry day, with a dry field, it could have been a different result."

The Jumbos were able to pick it up after the goal, stepping up their intensity and pouring on the attack over the last 25 minutes. But nothing would go, as shot after shot was blocked, went wide, or sailed just a little too high.

Tufts had a golden opportunity to tie the game with just under 21 minutes to go, as freshman Lindsay Garmirian was taken down in the box, giving the Jumbos a penalty kick. Jen Baldwin, who had four goals in the previous three games, two of them off penalty kicks, took the kick, but a combination of the rain, mud, cold, and just plain bad luck sent the ball wide left.

"I made every one in practice. But this one was in the middle of a mud pit," Baldwin said. "I couldn't feel my toes, and I just missed. It happens. But it shouldn't have had to come down to a penalty kick. We should have made some of our chances. I know the conditions were horrible, but they were horrible for both teams."

To Keene's credit, the Owls did a good job helping to slow down the Tufts offense, frustrating the Jumbos by using a trap system to draw the forwards offsides on a number of occasions, and quickly clearing out long balls played up into their zone.

"They ran an offside trap, and we fell for it a few times," coach Martha Whiting said. "We started to figure out what they were doing, but the through ball up the middle wasn't going to work, and at the beginning we tried to force that. We needed to play a lot more diagonal balls, which we started doing, but their sweeper was good and she was fast."

Even so, Tufts still got a number of strong chances, but was again plagued by an inability to put them away.

"The last 25 minutes we really stepped it up and started playing to our potential," Tooley said. "We had a good number of really dangerous chances, but it didn't go our way. The conditions weren't the best, and that didn't help, but we put up a good fight."

Keene's defense tightened up against added pressure down the stretch, even when Whiting replaced junior defender Abby Herzberg with forward Sarah Callaghan in hopes of generating a late offensive. In the end, the Owls would bend but not break, as they were able to shake off a number of close calls, preserving the shut-out and earning the right to move on to the New England Regional finals yesterday against Wheaton.

The Jumbos' season ended with the loss, and dropped them to 13-4-1, still the second-highest win total in team history.

"We didn't play our best, but we definitely did not play badly," Tooley said. "It's a tough way to go out, but we had an awesome season."

But, despite the loss, Whiting remains positive about her team's performance.

"I'm extremely proud of the way the girls fought today," she said. "Anybody who was there could see that we just kept going right until the last whistle, and we had so many opportunities. We can't lose sight of the fact that we did some great things this year. We can't let this one loss overshadow that."