With momentum riding into the Big Ten Tournament semifinals, the MSU women’s soccer team failed to heat up in the freezing cold, wet, rainy and snowy conditions in Iowa City, Iowa.
Penn State, the regular-season conference champion, knocked off the Spartans 1-0 just a day after the Green and White slipped past Illinois 1-0 in a montage of penalty kicks in a sudden-death shootout. They won 4-3 on kicks — the game-winner coming from freshman defender Courtney Shegos just before freshman goalkeeper Jill Flietstra stopped the Fighting Illini’s Jamie Alvis’ last-ditch effort to keep the game going.
But against the Nittany Lions, while the struggles to score continued, the Spartans’ luck of finding the net in clutch situations didn’t.
“We came out with the right frame of mind and wanted to stick to the process — not wanting to be too confident (just because we beat them before),” junior midfielder Lauren Sinacola said. “After the game, it was disappointing, but we know we left everything on the field. It was a very tough game.”
Many members of the team (13-6-3 overall, 5-4-1 Big Ten) admitted to not being able to feel their hands and feet for the majority of the game because of the snow that whipped through the air the entire 90 minutes. The harsh conditions only made their attempts to score throughout the entire contest tougher, as they hoped to bounce back from Penn State’s Danielle Toney’s goal in the eighth minute.
But senior defender Kelley Amormino said she knows you can never settle for excuses. And if she and her Spartans want to make a run from here on out, “What if” can never start a sentence.
It’s time to simply play the game and leave everything else out.
“We have to stay together, use a lot of people on the field and that will hopefully let us get through,” Amormino said. “It’s cold and it’s only going to get colder.”
MSU will find out its NCAA Tournament fate at 8 p.m. Monday.
MSU head coach Tom Saxton said he knows he has a great team this year and if they do get the opportunity to play in the tournament, he and his staff will gather information as fast as possible on the squad they will face to start the week of training before heading out on Thursday.
In the NCAA, the top 16 teams normally host a four-team regional, with one game on Friday and the other just two days later on Sunday.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up in South Bend (Indiana),” said Saxton, in reference to Notre Dame’s impressive year in the region closest to the Great Lakes as teams normally stay close to home.
Saxton said however it shakes out, he knows his team worked hard, never giving up.
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