Soccer

Soccer team shutout twice over the weekend

Alex Atkinson
September 26, 2010

Missed opportunities plagued the Kent State soccer team’s offense in a 1-0 loss at Bowling Green yesterday.

The Flashes took nine shots on goal against the Falcons, but all their shots failed to find the back of the net. Kent State coach Rob Marinaro said he was disappointed with the number of missed chances.

“We’re not taking advantage of our opportunities,” Marinaro said. “Even a little bit extra to create a few more opportunities for yourself. With two real close results, those are things that, with maturity, we’ll understand what those differences are. We need to understand that and we need to understand that real quickly.”

The offensive statistics were nearly identical with Bowling Green taking 12 shots with seven landing on goal. Bowling Green’s Tracy Togba capitalized on her opportunity and scored her first goal in the 82nd minute to give the Falcons the 1-0 lead.

“They got one lucky opportunity,” senior defender Vanessa Salerno said. “In the (Mid-American Conference), it comes down to one lucky goal, and they got it. We ended up not finishing any of our opportunities. At the end of the day, it’s that one lucky shot that can win games.”

“You create your own luck,” Marinaro said. “Unfortunately, we haven’t found ways to create more luck for ourselves, and we’ll continue to work to do that.”

The Flashes began the weekend with an upsetting performance against Miami. The RedHawks scored just five minutes into the game, which has been a problem for Kent State this year. The Flashes have trailed in all nine of its games so far this season.

“We need to bring a lot more to the MAC conference games,” Marinaro said. “I think we were a little tentative to start. It took us way too long to develop our own offense today, and we just had a fantastic surge of energy in the last 20 minutes. But it takes more than 20 minutes to win a game.”

Similar to the team’s last game at IUPUI, Marinaro said he felt the team lost focus of its game plan.

“We played too much to their style of game,” Marinaro said. “We were too concerned with what they were doing. We should have done a little bit more to create our own offense.”

However, Marinaro said he was very impressed with his defense’s performance.

“I think Miami’s offense is fantastic and I think we did an extremely nice job today at holding them to one.” Marinaro said. “(The defense) did a very nice job today.”

In her first collegiate start, Julie Keslar recorded nine saves.

“Julie made a lot of really nice plays and kept us in the game,” Marinaro said of the sophomore keeper.

Marinaro summed up the weekend by saying, “Both games could have gone either way. We’ll try and straighten that out and turn it around so that those tight outcomes turn our way.”

The Flashes finish their long road trip next weekend with a 4 p.m. game at Western Michigan Friday and a game at 1 p.m. game at Northern Illinois Sunday.