With two dominating performances over the weekend, the women’s soccer team continued its hot start to the fall season, moving to 5-1-1 on the season. On Friday at Parsons Field in Boston, the Big Green came back from a one-goal deficit in the second half to beat Northeastern University by a score of 3-1. On Sunday, Dartmouth’s offense exploded at its home Burnham Field to take down Sacred Heart University by a lopsided score of 6-0.
In the team’s first six games this year, which came at the end of the match against Northeastern, the Big Green had tallied 14 goals. It took until Oct. 25 last year for the team to score its 14th goal of the season, a milestone which didn’t come until the team’s 12th game. The defeat of Sacred Heart brought the team’s season goal total to 20, one more than the entirety of last season produced.
“It feels fantastic,” Jackie Friedman ’16 said about the team’s offensive output. “It feels like we haven’t scored this many goals this early in the season, pretty much in my entire Dartmouth career, and I’m a senior, so it’s been pretty impressive so far.”
Last season, the Big Green took on both Northeastern and Sacred Heart but with markedly different results. Dartmouth beat Northeastern last season as well, but in a much harder fought battle, coming out victorious in double overtime by a 1-0 score.
The Big Green fell to the Pioneers last year in a tightly contested 1-0 game. This year’s 6-0 blowout victory over Sacred Heart seems to augur even greater success for Dartmouth this year than last season’s already stellar second-place finish in the Ivy League.
Northeastern had started the season strong, after defeating six of its first eight opponents, and it showed right off the bat. In the first 10 minutes of the first half, the Huskies seemed to be controlling the pace of play and notched three shots while Dartmouth was unable to tally any. With two corner kicks in the opening 10 minutes as well, Northeastern was spending more time in the offensive third than the Big Green could.
As the first half continued, so did the trendline. Though Dartmouth was able to notch three shots in a five minute span in the first half, including one by Remy Borinsky ’19 that slammed off the cross bar, the Big Green was not able to put a goal home. Then, in the 43rd minute, Northeastern seized control of the game with a goal that put them ahead by a 1-0 margin.
Off a corner by Northeastern’s junior Breeana Koemans, Mackenzie Dowd took a shot at the net. Her initial parry was blocked, but the rebound came out to junior striker Carina Deandreis who slammed a shot into the top right corner of the net to give the Huskies a 1-0 lead.
“Northeastern was a hard game and, you know, that was one where we weathered a lot of pressure from them in the first half and maybe got even a little bit fortunate to get out of the half down just 1-0,” head coach Ron Rainey said. “The group came out really hard in the second half and kind of imposed their will defensively all over the field. Then, when we had our opportunities, we finished on them. We were down 1-0, and then 15 minutes later, we were up 3-1.”
Rainey also praised the team’s resilience in overcoming the first half deficit.
The score held through halftime and in the beginning of the second half, though Northeastern narrowly missed an opportunity to push the lead to two goals when Taylor Caparo’s shot deflected off the crossbar. With just 25 minutes left in the game, Dartmouth was staring a 1-0 deficit and potential out-of-conference loss directly in the face. The Big Green, however, would rally back and show the resilience that carried the squad through much of last season.
“We’re a little more defensive minded in the beginning, making sure that we’re keeping them in front of us and stuff like that,” Friedman said. “Then, by the second half, it’s time to really turn it up.”
In the 68th minute, Jill Dayneka ’16 headed home a corner kick from Borinsky to even the game at a goal apiece. A well-placed corner by Borinsky into the center of the box set Dayneka up to knot the game up in the final 25 minutes of game action.
About five minutes later, the Big Green would keep the momentum rolling and strike back to take the lead. Lauren Lucas ’19 wrested control of the ball along the endline and then crossed it into the box. Lucielle Kozlov ’16 slammed it home to put the Big Green up for good. Less than 10 minutes later, Kozlov struck again to give Dartmouth a 3-1 lead. Amidst a chaotic scramble inside the box, Kozlov found the ball and poked it into the goal past Northeastern’s sophomore goalkeeper Jill Quinn. Northeastern proved unable to muster a shot in the final 30 minutes of action, allowing Dartmouth to hold on for the 3-1 win.
Rainey said that scoring a single goal can help the team relax and allow more goals to flood out from there.
“I also think that when you get a goal or you get a second goal, it just totally relaxes you,” Rainey said. “Then our forwards have been doing a very good job of moving off the ball and creating some real good chances.”
The Big Green outshot the Huskies for the game by a 10-9 margin for the game, thanks to a 6-2 margin in the second half. Besides the goal scorers, Friedman also delivered a standout performance for the Big Green, tallying four shots with three of them on goal. Goalkeeper Casey Cousineau ’17 had two saves, while Quinn had five saves for the Huskies.
After Friday’s comeback win against the Huskies, the Big Green came to Burnham Field to face off against the Sacred Heart Pioneers. Though the game started fairly slowly, the Big Green would eventually explode to a blowout win.
Kozlov followed her standout performance Friday with an early goal on Sunday to put the team ahead 1-0. Dartmouth opened up in the 4-3-3 formation and generated a scoring chance early on, once again thanks to a corner kick from Borinsky. Borinsky’s corner landed near the box and Kozlov emerged from a scrum to put the women on the board.
Off the restart, Sacred Heart nearly managed to tie the game right back up. They quickly earned a corner kick and only a diving save by Cousineau kept the Pioneers out of the back of the net.
Play was relatively tight through the rest of the first half with neither team managing to notch another goal. Dartmouth seemed to control the pace of play, but whenever there was a lapse in focus by the Big Green, the Pioneers quickly drove upfield and struck. Still, the Big Green entered the second half with a slim 1-0 lead.
The second half would be a completely different story for the hometown team. Just seven minutes into the second half, Kozlov would strike again to double the team’s lead. After Brittany Champagne ’18 sparked a run up the left side of the field, Champagne took a shot on goal. Though Sacred Heart’s goalie Talia Schwartz managed to deflect Champagne’s sally at net, Kozlov slammed the rebound into the back of the net for her ninth goal of the season in the Big Green’s seventh game.
A two-goal lead could have been comfortable enough for the Big Green, but the onslaught of goals kept coming. Within four minutes, Dartmouth added another goal to its already stalwart lead with this one also coming off of a second-chance opportunity.
Friedman took a shot off the net that drew Sacred Heart’s Schwartz off her line once again. This gave Melanie Vangel ’18 an opportunity to slot the ball in the back of the net.
“It feels really good to finally put them away,” Vangel said. “I think I’ve just gotten a lot more confident to be involved in. We’ve been scoring a lot more this year, and I’m glad that I finally stepped up.”
The goals kept coming for the Big Green in rapid succession. Less than a minute later, Vangel tallied an assist on a goal by Lindsay Knutson ’18. In the 65th minute, Vangel added a second goal to push the Big Green ahead by a 5-0 margin. As the clock ran down in the blowout, Dartmouth notched one final goal to go up 6-0. Gia Parker ’18 scored in the 86th minute off an assist by Jessica Lukas ’17.
Friedman attributed the team’s offensive success to the diversity of options available on the attacking side of the ball.
“I think that we’re really using everyone on the team this year,” Friedman said. “It’s not just us relying on one or two players to score all our goals, we’re incorporating everyone and it’s raising the level of the entire team.
The 6-0 win matched the Big Green’s previous largest win of the season when the team took down the University of Vermont by the same score. Dartmouth dominated the game throughout, outshooting Sacred Heart by a 14-6 margin overall, with a 10-4 margin in the second half.
The Big Green next take the field against the University of Massachussetts at Lowell at Burnham Field on Thursday at 7 p.m. Friedman cited the fact that the women haven’t lost a home game since October 2012 as a boost of confidence for team going into this week’s game.
