As the weekend approaches, Georgetown’s women’s soccer prepares for three able opponents – DePaul, Notre Dame and pressure.
Friday and Sunday will mark the Hoyas’ final two games of the season, and a postseason berth is on the line. After eight straight wins, Georgetown (11-5-1, 4-4-1 Big East) took four losses in its last five games against conference opponents.
The Hoyas will play fighting-to-survive DePaul (4-7-4, 2-4-3) Friday in Chicago and the reigning national champion, No. 7 Notre Dame (14-2-0, 8-1-0), Sunday in South Bend, Ind. The matches follow two frustrating defeats against lowly Pittsburgh (3-9-3, 2-5-2) and highly ranked West Virginia (9-3-3, 6-1-1).
“We gave them a lot of opportunities and they scored goals where we should have stopped them,” Georgetown Head Coach Dave Nolan said of last week’s game against Pitt. “You don’t win games that way.”
The DePaul Blue Demons enter their match against Georgetown with one loss – against No. 10 Connecticut – in their last four games. DePaul’s offense is middle-of-the-road beyond senior midfielder Julianne Sitch, a member of the Conference USA all-decade team, as no player bring more than five points into the weekend.
Yet a team of similar makeup downed Georgetown in its match against West Virginia, when two players netted their first and fourth goals of the season for a team on which four players have at least three goals.
“Other teams have been keen on her and trying to erase her and they’ve done a good job of it,” Coach John Wilson said of his star player. “She does [produce] a tremendous amount but what we need is for other players to step up for her and that hasn’t happened as often as we’ve needed it.”
Sitch leads the team in points and goals with nine and three, respectively, and has more than twice as many shots as the second-leading shooter.
“We’re both teams with potent offenses, but we’re both capable of giving up goals where we view with nothing but a question mark,” Wilson said. He believes the deciding factor may be which team’s “role players step up.”
As the home team, DePaul has a distinct advantage not only in crowd support but also in the artificial grass on which they play.
“We’re going to be playing on this surface which is something we haven’t really played on a whole lot,” Nolan said. “The advantage would have to be with them.”
Defending national champion Notre Dame enters this weekend ranked seventh in the nation with 21 returning players on a roster of 28. Notre Dame leads the nation in goals scored with 71 in 16 games and is sixth in the nation with .69 shutouts per game.
After one of the greatest seasons in Division I history (23 goals and 24 assists) – on par, in fact, with Mia Hamm’s best years UNC – senior midfielder Katie Thorlakson has seen her point total decline this season thanks to contributions from freshman phenomenon Kerri Hanks.
Head Coach Randy Waldrum describes Hanks, who has the team lead in goals with 19 to Thorlakson’s 13, as “just another really good goal scorer.”
Thorlakson, meanwhile, is “having just as good a year as last year for us,” Waldrum said. “What she doesn’t have in the goals she’s really picked up in her assists, and she’s pretty much blowing away everyone else in the country with that.”
Thorlakson and Irish senior defender Candace Chapman are members of the Canadian national team and give Notre Dame an elite presence at both ends of the field. The degree to which they are used on Sunday, however, is another question.
“You’re going to be seeing a lot of players you don’t normally see playing for us, just trying to get the regulars rested before the NCAAs,” Waldrum said.
Said Nolan, however, “I don’t buy that. We played them here last year and he had six of his players out resting. We had [a lot of shots on goal] and those players were back in within five minutes. So I think he’s been a little disrespectful if he’s going to rest his players in that fashion.”
There are only three remaining spots open in the Big East tournament, and another losing weekend will remove the Hoyas’ postseason potential from their control. Georgetown’s destiny would rest on the results of other conference games.
