Panthers travel west for weekend road trip
August 27, 2015
The Eastern women’s soccer team heads on a two-game weekend road trip to Western Illinois Friday and Northern Iowa Sunday.
The Panthers walked away with a 0-1-1 record last weekend after playing to a draw with IUPUI last Friday and lost, 6-0, to Northern Kentucky last Sunday.
Based on Sunday’s game, Eastern coach Jason Cherry felt like his team needed to work on attacking to defending and defending to attacking.
“We did a much better job of that Friday against IUPUI,” he said. “But, Sunday it was a hard transition back and forth.”
Eastern senior Hannah Miller said it was easy to put the 6-0 loss to Northern Kentucky behind them and focus on the weekend ahead.
“It was a tough loss,” she said. “But, in order for us to move forward and focus on this weekend, we had to just put it behind us. We did learn a lot from our mistakes and will work hard to make sure they don’t happen again.”
Sophomore forward Madi Fischer gains possession of the ball while senior Claire Pultz leaps on her during a match on Oct. 5 2014 at Lakeside Field.
Eastern senior Molly Hawkins said setting the tone early at the start of the game against Western is really important.
The Panthers fell behind, 1-0, 12 minutes into the game against Northern Kentucky and were eventually down, 3-0, by halftime.
“We just need to play our game, keep possession and make them chase,” she said. “We also need to be aggressive. (Western) has always been an aggressive team, so we need to really show up.”
Western has played one game this season and took a 1-0 loss against the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Western was able to put up seven shots in the game, three of which were on goal.
The Leathernecks are a fairly young team with 16 freshmen on the squad.
Northern Iowa, on the other hand, is 1-0-1 after defeating the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, 1-0, in overtime and playing to a 3-3 draw with Southeast Missouri.
Senior Annie Dale leads Northern Iowa with two goals on the season.
Cherry said the keys to getting a couple of victories over the weekend is simply to just keeping the ball and staying together as a unit.
“I think we kind of have the same tactic that Western will have,” he said. “Let’s keep the ball and make them chase the game.”
The Panthers and Leathernecks will kick off at 3 p.m. Friday and at 12 p.m. against Northern Iowa Sunday.
Bob Reynolds can be reached at 581-2812 or rjreynolds@eiu.edu.
