Reunions can be a lot of fun, but, as Georgetown Head Coach Brian Wiese discovered on Saturday, they can also be disappointing.
After spending the last five years as an assistant coach for No. 8 Notre Dame, Wiese returned to South Bend, Ind., for a Big East conference game between the Hoyas and the Irish. Despite Wiese’s inside knowledge of his former team, Georgetown was unable to stop the Notre Dame offense, as the Irish came away with a 4-1 victory.
“For me, it was good to see everybody, but at the same time, you still want to beat [Notre Dame] awfully bad,” Wiese said. “In a lot of ways it would have been the sweetest win of the year.”
Georgetown recovered from the loss with a 3-0 non-conference win against Lafayette on Tuesday at North Kehoe Field, upping their out of conference record to 3-3 while they continue to struggle in the Big East at 2-6.
Georgetown has three games remaining in the regular season, all against Big East opponents. In order to qualify for the Big East tournament, the Hoyas must finish among the top six teams in the Big East Blue Division. Georgetown currently stands in seventh place, four points behind the Pittsburgh Panthers, who the Hoyas will face on the road next Wednesday.
Against Notre Dame (10-3-2, 6-2-0), Georgetown was outscored by junior forward Joseph Lapira, who leads the nation in goals and points. Lapira notched two goals and an assist in the contest to increase his season totals to 17 goals and 36 points.
Georgetown fell behind in the 13th minute, as Notre Dame senior forward Justin McGeeney took a pass from sophomore midfielder Cory Rellas and scored from 12 yards out. Georgetown senior forward and co-captain Ricky Schramm responded with his team-leading ninth goal of the season in the 30th minute. Senior midfielder Daniel Grasso found Schramm, who got past Irish senior goalkeeper Chris Cahill and deposited the ball into the lower right side of the goal.
The Irish permanently went ahead less than five minutes later when freshman midfielder Justin Morrow sent a cross to Lapira, who beat Georgetown junior goalkeeper Joe Devine from 10 yards out.
“[Notre Dame] is organized, has good players throughout the field, and if you don’t play a perfect game and if you give opportunities away, they’ll take advantage of them,” Wiese said.
Lapira scored again in the 60th minute off of an attempted clear by Devine. In the 79th minute, Lapira sent a corner kick to senior midfielder Greg Dalby, who headed it into the left side of the net for Notre Dame’s final goal.
“The last three goals were, from our point of view, goals that we should have handled better,” Wiese said. “And that’s the hard thing – you say that if you’re going to lose the game, make sure the other team earns it. I think one of the things that we didn’t do well on Saturday was that we didn’t make [Notre Dame] earn the win. We didn’t take care of the details.”
Notre Dame outshot Georgetown 15-10 and had a 5-4 advantage in corner kicks.
“Against Notre Dame, we came out flat,” senior defender and co-captain Tim Convey said. “We gave up a bunch of goals. We just weren’t very good.”
HOYAS 3, Lafayette 0
Tuesday’s game against Lafayette (7-3-1) was a different story for Georgetown, as junior forward Mike Glaccum scored a goal and tallied two assists to lead Georgetown to the 3-0 win.
Glaccum put the Hoyas on the scoreboard in the 40th minute with his third goal of the year off of an assist from Schramm. Sprinting past three Lafayette defenders down the left side of the field, Glaccum fired a left-footed shot from 16 yards out. Lafayette sophomore goalkeeper Ben Jacobs dove to his right, but the ball ended up in the center of the net after it deflected off of the leg of Lafayette freshman midfielder Sal Fusari.
“[Glaccum] is kind of an unsung hero,” Wiese said. “He’s one of our smarter players and he does a lot of the little things that you maybe don’t notice. But at the end of the day, he’s also a pretty good goal scorer.”
Georgetown’s second goal came in the 43rd minute after the Hoyas made three accurate passes inside the penalty box. From the left side of the field, sophomore midfielder Conor Neusel reversed the ball back to Schramm, who found Glaccum in the middle of the box. After passing the ball to Glaccum, Schramm broke toward the goal, and Glaccum caught him in stride. Schramm sent the ball to the bottom right corner of the net with his left foot for his 10th goal of the season, the third-highest total in the Big East.
In the 86th minute, freshman forward Justin Kondos scored his first collegiate goal to clinch the Georgetown win. Glaccum won the ball at midfield and led sophomore forward Richard Frank with a long pass down the right side of the field. Frank got behind the Lafayette defenders and crossed the ball to Kondos, who connected on a low line drive that beat Jacobs to the right corner.
“You have to really battle and hang in there for the first part of the game,” Wiese said. “The game will settle down a little bit and then at the end of each half, you’ll get chances – you’ll get space to get some opportunities. That’s when we scored all three goals.”
Both Glaccum and Kondos said that the Hoyas’ intensity in the game was the key to their success.
“We’ve been struggling from having weak starts and just being lazy and not going out strong,” Kondos said. “I think with a physical team like Lafayette, we had to come out hard and match their intensity.”
Glaccum added, “We knew that if we matched their intensity and we played just as hard as they did, we would be able to get our chances because we knew we were probably the more skilled team.”
Georgetown outshot Lafayette 12-8 and had a 5-4 advantage in corner kicks. Senior goalkeeper Andrew Keszler recorded his first shutout of the season and the 10th of his career.
“You can’t get a shutout without the whole team being on today,” he said.
The Hoyas will have to put together another strong performance in order to defeat No. 6 West Virginia (11-1-2, 6-0-1) on Saturday. Game time is set for 1 p.m. on North Kehoe Field.
