Last Tuesday the men’s soccer team outlasted Bates in a 2-1 double overtime win, marking its first conference victory of the season.
“Three points and a win against Bates is something that’s very nice to bring home,” said Head Coach Scott Wiercinski.
“I think we played particularly well on the offensive end,” Wiercinski added. “To score two goals against an in-league, in-state rival is great.”
Connor Keefe ’16 scored the first goal of the game off a feed from Andrew Jones ’16. Jones laid the ball right in front of the net for Keefe to slide in and knock it past the keeper.
The second goal came late in double overtime with the play starting off a corner kick from Hunter Miller ’16. Miller passed it to Melong ’15 who played a ball into the box that Keefe headed to Ben Citrin ’16. Citrin played it to Eric Goitia ’15 who banged home the winning goal with 2:39 left in the period.
“When you get five guys involved in a goal it’s always a good thing,” Coach Wiercinski said.
Earlier in the week the team fell to Amherst at home in a 1-0 defeat.
Although the Polar Bears came away from the game without a point, their play is encouraging moving forward with the rest of the season.
“[Amherst is] a particularly difficult team to play against because they’re so aggressive,” said Wiercinski. “But I thought we defended very well and we just made a few mistakes, which, unfortunately, accounted for the difference in the scoreboard.”
Goitia was also content with the team’s play.
“Overall, we put together a pretty good performance against Amherst except for a couple mistakes that ended up costing us,” said Goitia. “Attacking-wise we had some good chances against both Amherst and Bates.”
Though some players found positives to take from the games this week, they still see areas where the team needs to upgrade its play if it wants to be succesful later in the season.
“Most importantly I think our sense of urgency needs to improve,” said Wiercinski.
“There have been too many occasions where the wrong guy in the field is taking a timeout mentally and not fully engaged in whats important, whether defending or attacking, and some of those mistakes have really cost us.”
Based on improvements the team has made thus far, Goitia has high hopes for future games.
“I think we have a good team and have a lot more season left to prove it,” Goitia said.
The Polar Bears travel to Middlebury tomorrow to take on the Panthers at noon.