Hanover
Her Big Green counterpart, Ron Rainey, kept his message to his downcast players short.
“This one hurts,” said Rainey, whose side lost the teams’ Ivy League opener, 1-0, despite a 12-5 edge in shots. “We get a day off and then we need a good week of practice.”
It doesn’t get any easier from here. Dartmouth (6-3) visits defending league champion Princeton (7-1-1, 0-1-1) on Saturday and five of its final regular season games are against Ancient Eight foes.
Dartmouth was 1-4-4 in one-goal games last season, all those results last occurring during Ivy action with the exception of one loss. The Big Green finished 8-4-4 overall but just 1-3-3 in league play, good for seventh place a year after finishing second during Rainey’s debut season.
Dartmouth is 3-3 in one-goal games so far this fall, but Rainey knows more are likely to come during tooth-and-nail clashes against Ivy foes. He and his troops are in real need of discovering how to win them.
“Soccer’s a low-scoring game and especially against teams of equal abilities,” said Rainey, who is 22-12-8 overall and 4-5-6 in league play since arriving from the University of Iowa. “One of the cool thing about the Ivy League is that its parity allows for a lot of close games.
“Each team might have three to five good scoring chances and finishing on them is the difference. For us to get a goal, we maybe need to generate one or two more and then you start seeing the ball go in the net; it becomes infectious.”
Dartmouth’s close-but-not-quite efforts were encapsulated by Sunday’s scoring play, which unfolded 90 seconds before halftime. Sarah Cobb’s corner kick was first headed by teammate Maclaine Lehan and then knocked up and away by Big Green goalkeeper Casey Cousineau, but the ball hit the crossbar and dropped straight down.
Bears sophomore Kate Maher scored her first career goal by tapping it over the line with Cousineau sprawled on the turf near the back post. Had Cousineau’s punch lifted the ball even another few inches, it would have likely landed atop the net.
“I thought we challenged the ball pretty well in the air on that play, but we’ll break it down on film and see what led to them playing the ball into our end and on the kick,” Rainey said.
Dartmouth carried play during the second half, taking all seven of the stanza’s shots. The Bears (5-1-3) didn’t exactly pack it into the back, but they definitely assumed a defensive posture. Sophomore goalkeeper Christine Etzell made five saves to post her eighth shutout of the season and the 12th of her career, fifth on Brown’s career list.
Etzell entered the weekend in the top four of NCAA Division I backstops in shutouts, goals-against average and save percentage and is already third on her program’s list for shutouts in a season.
“Especially during the second half, we had way more chances than they did,” said Dartmouth sophomore midfielder Remy Borinsky, one of nine Big Green players to have started every game in which she’s appeared. “We kept getting balls into the box but unfortunately, they didn’t go in.”
Said Rainey: “Your heart breaks for the team because they wanted to win so much. But I think that after we reflect a little bit we’ll see all the good things we did and multiple them in the next game and work on our deficiencies.”
Notes: Dartmouth co-captain and senior midfielder Holly Patterson suffered what appeared to be an ankle injury midway through the game and did not return … Dartmouth’s next home game is Oct. 8 at 4 p.m. against Yale … McNeil took over as Brown’s coach after last season. The Connecticut native was the 2004 national high school player of the year and later competed at Boston College. Her predecessor, Phil Pincince, retired after 39 years leading the Bears … Notre Dame is 7-1-3 under former Dartmouth coach Theresa Romagnolo and 35-13-6 under her since she arrived at the school before the 2014 season. She was 25-22-3 during three campaigns with the Big Green.
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com or 603-727-3227.