The Sacramento State women’s soccer team suffered a devastating 2-1 loss after allowing two second-half goals to the visiting Saint Mary’s Gaels at Hornet Field on Sunday.
Although Sac State (2-4-2) held a 1-0 advantage for a majority of the game, Saint Mary’s (2-7-1) junior forward Hannah Diaz split two Hornet defenders and lofted a spinning kick for a goal in the 67th minute and added another score in the 76th minute to win the game.
“We just got gassed out and I don’t know if it’s the heat or what it is, but I just think we didn’t play to the best of our potential,” Sac State assistant coach Katie Burton said. “I think we thought we were gonna come out here and it’s going to be easy because [Saint Mary’s] played yesterday, but we didn’t come out really reacting to them, late to tackles, late getting to our players, disjointed, needed more communication.”
The lone Hornet goal came from Sac State junior midfielder/forward Andrea Boehm as she scored in the 10th minute off an assist from sophomore midfielder Caitlin Prothe inside the box.
“[Cait] was actually running through with the ball and I actually didn’t think she was going to pass it to me,” Boehm said. “Then she looked the other way, passed it to me, and boom.”
Prothe went down soon after the score when she tweaked her foot in a tackle attempt and had to be helped off the the field, but was able to continue playing later as the Hornets suffered the disappointing finish.
“I thought we did way better in the first half,” Prothe said. “In the second half we just couldn’t possess the ball, and usually we’re really good at getting on the wide and then beating the defender, but we couldn’t even create opportunities.”
Sac State has still yet to win a game in the month of September after losing and drawing twice in the last four matches, but Burton believes this will be a great lesson for the entire roster going into conference competition.
“It’s a good test for us to come off a loss like this…a big challenge for our team for the rest of the season is how are you going to react when you’re down, so we’ll see,” Burton said.
The Hornets will enter Big Sky Conference play next, on the road against Southern Utah on Friday at Thunderbird Soccer Field in Cedar City, Utah.
