After spending the past two weeks in Madison, the University of Wisconsin men’s soccer team will head out to College Park, Maryland, to take on the Maryland Terrapins Friday.

Wisconsin (1-4-1 overall, 0-1-0 Big Ten) is finally starting to play a dominantly Big Ten schedule after playing against some very tough teams in their non-conference schedule. The team feels that playing some of the country’s more elite teams has prepared them well for the Big Ten schedule, starting with Maryland (2-3-2 overall, 0-1-1 Big Ten).

This has been head coach John Trask’s plan all along. With such a young team, he really wanted to challenge the new players at the start of their college careers. Now, with the Big Ten season coming into full swing, Trask feels his team is ready.

“This was the whole goal of it,” Trask said. “This is the second time we are going to be in Washington D.C. in three weeks. Having gone out there and playing two very good teams in Georgetown and George Mason, this is what it’s all about. Hopefully we can go out there and survive a much sterner test than those two teams we played a couple weeks ago.”

With such a young, inexperienced team, the difficult non-conference schedule has allowed the players to see where they need to improve as the losses have piled up for UW.

Despite four losses in six games, these Badgers feel like they’ve been able to do some good things. Coming off of what Trask said was their most “complete” match against St. John’s last Friday, the team feels they have a lot to apply as they get into the heart of the season.

“The attention to detail on defense has been much better,” junior midfielder Drew Conner said. “Offensively, we just need to take more chances, as we did against St. John’s, in the other half of the field. In that game, we went at them a little bit more and got a little more creative than we had been prior.”

Wisconsin will need to bring their A-game Friday as Maryland has one of the nation’s most historic and premier soccer programs. Maryland made it all the way to the national championship game last year before losing 2-1 to another national powerhouse, Notre Dame.

So far this year, Maryland hasn’t been as strong on the offensive side of the ball, only scoring six goals in their first seven games. Nevertheless, the Terrapins still have the ability to bring offensive pressure. In their last match, a 1-0 victory against Dayton, despite only scoring one goal, Maryland was able to get off 16 shots on goal.

Maryland’s six goals this season have come from six different players. So while the team hasn’t found a primary goal scorer yet, they will still be difficult to contain.

“They have a lot of really tricky guys,” redshirt junior defender Carl Schneider said. “Coach Trask was telling us while they don’t move that dynamically well, they are still very technical and very tough players to contain. So we are just trying to go into the match with a tough mentality.”

While offensively Maryland has struggled, they have made up for it with their strong defensive play.

At the head of that defense is sophomore goalkeeper Zack Steffen. Steffen, despite being only in his second year, has already established himself as one of the Big Ten’s best keepers.

“We’ve been fortunate enough to have gotten goals in every game, but Zack Steffen is an excellent, national team-level goalkeeper, and they have an excellent overall defense,” Trask said. “Steffen is very capable of making big saves, so we are really going to have to be clinical in our finishing to get a ball by him.”

On top of Maryland producing great talent, the program is also notorious for having one of the best and toughest atmospheres at their home field in College Park.

Maryland finished last season with a 10-2-1 record at home and have posted a 2-1-1 record to start this season. Trask and his team understand the atmosphere they’ll be walking into Friday night, but are also excited and ready for the challenge.

“Maryland is a very tough place to play,” Trask said. “On Friday nights they average around 5,000 people to a game. They have a very good record of goal-scoring, but for whatever reason they haven’t seemed to find that goal scorer yet this year. But I know they’ll be figuring it out, and they’ll be ready for big-time Big Ten match-up against the Badgers.”

The Badgers will hit the pitch and look to get their first road win of the year Friday against the Terrapins at 6:30 p.m. (CT) in College Park.