Eastern’s defense is thinning out at an alarming rate.

Senior William Bruce broke his foot early on in preseason, and fellow senior Trey Gora went down with a foot injury in the first game of the season against the University of Chicago.

When freshman David Brown went down at the tail end of the team’s 5-1 loss to Detroit Mercy, the alarm bells started ringing that Eastern could have an injury crisis.

Head coach Josh Oakley opened up about the situation on Thursday after the game against Purdue Fort Wayne, stating the team must remain mentally locked in to cope with the injuries.

“Every time something like that happens, especially where we’re at, heads go down, they drop, and you have to be really really astute to that,” Oakley said. “You have to make sure that we keep going.”

Oakley said he hasn’t seen an injury crisis this peculiar in 22 years.

“When it seems like it’s piling on, we have to take a breath, step back, and go from there,” Oakley said. “It’s something very very very weird. The chances of it are probably one in a million.”

The vacancies have been partly filled by redshirt junior Ben Martin, a transfer from Parkland Community College who played for the youth academies of Stoke City and AFC Rochdale in England.

Martin wrote off the injuries as bad luck and as a result of playing too many games in a short period of time.

“We got lucky last year with not many injuries; it’s bound to happen at some point though,” Martin said. “It’s a lot of soccer in such a short amount of time. It’s hard to avoid all these injuries. It’s a shame that they’ve all been in one position mainly, but the lads are keeping their morales as high as they can, even the injured ones.”

Martin himself has just become available to the team. He had been dealing with an ankle injury that he picked up early on in preseason, which kept him sidelined until recently.

“Obviously I was upset about my injury in the first place,” Martin said. “It happened at bad time. I had been training over the summer, and as soon as I come back, [I had] to get an injury.”

Martin, who was sent off at the tail end of Eastern’s game against Evansville on Wednesday, says that he’s fully recovered from the ankle injury, and that his body feels a lot better after the rehab process.

Eastern’s back four has mostly consisted so far of sophomore Kyle Ward at left back and redshirt freshman Patrick Osilaja at right back.

With the revolving door at center back, the team has struggled to limit the number of goals conceded. Eastern has conceded eight goals in its first three games, tied for most since 2019.

What remains to be seen is how the freshmen will fill the gaps, as both Nate Hageman and Sebastian Piatkiewicz have seen significant game time.

The more the team can rely on the same group of players to play every game, the better the chemistry is between them, something that Oakley says is important to tightening the defense and limiting the goals given up.

Gabe Newman can be reached at 581-2812 or at ghnewman@eiu.edu.