Scots Remain Optimistic After Tough Defeat

Jessica Bacon scored Wooster's only goal late in the first half.

No matter how evenly-matched two teams may be on paper, sometimes for one reason or another one squad just owns the other.

That can be said of the recent Allegheny College-College of Wooster women's soccer series.

Both teams have finished between second- and fourth-place in the North Coast Athletic Conference since 1997, however, the Gators have gotten the better of the Scots during each of their annual meetings by a combined margin of 11-2, including Tuesday's 4-1 Allegheny victory at Wooster.

After 20 minutes of scoreless play, the Gators broke through the stingy Scot defense, which had a streak of four consecutive shutouts entering the contest, twice within a four-minute time period. First, freshman Lauren Moser got open in front of the Wooster goal and knocked the ball in on a neatly-fed pass from sophomore Kryss Jones, who later scored the lone goal of the second half. Then, the Gators executed a near-perfect corner kick, culminating in a header from freshman Teresa Lettrich into the back of the net off a pass from sophomore Jane Och.

Wooster was able to pull the match back to 2-1 at the 6:35 mark of the first half when sophomore Beth Hemminger booted a long pass up to classmate Jessica Bacon, who then wove through the Gator defense and created a one-on-one with the goalie en route to scoring her first goal of the year.

However, the Scots' momentum only lasted 35 seconds, as Allegheny marched right back down the field, and scored when freshman Jill Malone came out of a crowd of people in front of the Wooster net and passed it off to a wide open freshman Claudia Garcia, who tallied the goal.

"It was very disappointing to come out and go two goals down and not only that ... but give a third away," commented Scot head coach David Brown.

Despite the discouraging loss, Brown says the team's original objective remains achievable, and that is to simply finish in the top-four in the NCAC. By doing that, Wooster can earn a bid into the conference's inaugural postseason tournament, in which the winner will earn an automatic bid into the NCAA Tournament.

"That has been (our goal) from the beginning of the year. It's going to take four or five wins to get in. We come back on Thursday and have a non-conference game, in which we'll try to sort some things out defensively. Then, we'll get some rest with fall break this weekend, and hopefully we'll be ready to win some key conference games."

The Scots, who are now 6-3-0 overall and 1-1-0 in the NCAC, will travel to Walsh on Thursday (Sept. 28) for a 4:30 p.m. match-up with the Cavaliers, while Allegheny improved to 8-2-0 and 2-1-0 in conference play.