Sunday’s matchup could offer some much-needed relief for the Wisconsin women’s soccer team, who has been shut out of its last two conference games.
UW (11-2-1, 5-2-1 Big Ten) will go head-to-head with conference rival Northwestern (5-6-2, 1-5-1 Big Ten), who by the looks of how its season has panned out, shouldn’t present much of a problem.
The Badgers have been experiencing some frustration recently, falling to No. 6 Penn State last Sunday 2-0 before tying the University of Iowa in a scoreless game Wednesday night.
Wisconsin head coach Paula Wilkins said her team had been prepared to meet tough competition over a tough stretch of games.
“We knew going into this it was going to be a hard stretch for us,” Wilkins said. “I thought we needed to be a little more consistent with what we were trying to do.”
Specifically, striker Kodee Williams mentioned that something the team needs to work on heading into the home stretch of the regular season is following through.
“We obviously need to work on our finishing if teams are going to sit in on us,” Williams said. “We need to learn to deal with their pressure and their backline that we haven’t been really great at the past two games.”
Williams has been a key factor for her team’s success this season. Leading the roster in shots taken, the redshirt senior has been in the center of all the action this season, and was one of the returning players from last season who went the extra mile in the off season, putting in additional hours in the gym and spring season to prepare for her final year.
Northwestern has a player much like Williams in sophomore Addie Steiner. She is currently leading the Wildcats in goals, points and overall shots, and has proven to be one of the more consistent players in the Big Ten this season.
But while Wisconsin offense has been slow over its last two games, the defense picked up between the Penn State game and Iowa Wednesday. UW goalkeeper Genevieve Richard shut out the Hawkeyes Wednesday after giving up two goals to the Nittany Lions earlier in the week, finding her momentum from earlier in the season. She continues to lead the conference in total shutouts with eight.
Additionally, Richard noticed that Penn State’s offense Wednesday night had started to adapt to UW’s tight defense, an obvious indicator that things had picked up on the backline. This has given Richard confidence that the Badgers can hold off Steiner and the rest of the Northwestern bench Sunday.
“When you see the other team modify their corners when the play against you, that’s always a good sign,” Richard said. “I think we’ve been pretty solid so far defensively.”
As far as the team’s offense is concerned, it’s not so much that Wisconsin is in a slump as it is a run of bad luck on the frontline. The Badgers racked up 18 shots in the Iowa game alone, putting the kibosh on the notion that the team is failing to create opportunities for themselves.
Wilkins said that at this point, she just needs her squad to believe that if they continue setting up these opportunities for themselves, the rest will happen naturally.
“It’s going to come. I keep telling them that they’ve got to have faith,” Wilkins said.
