By Trevor Wenners, News Correspondent
The women’s soccer teams’ first winning streak of the year came to an end with a 4-2 loss to the University of North Carolina-Wilmington Seahawks at Parsons Field on Sunday.
The Huskies were led by senior forward Greta Samuelsdottir’s two goals, but what head coach Tracey Leone called poor ball handling negated the leading-goal scorer’s work.
“The first two goals, we had bad back passes to them,” Leone said. “The second one was another back pass we gave them; we had the ball and we gave them the ball in two bad spots.”
Samuelsdottir extended her point streak to three games when she netted the first goal of the match at 7:21 off a free kick just outside of the box which was assisted by junior midfielder Hanna Terry.
“It does not matter that you score two goals because when you lose, you lose,” Samuelsdottir said. “The biggest lesson is that the game is 90 minutes, it is not 45.”
The Seahawks evened the game at 16:37 with freshman midfielder Morgan Leyble’s header off of senior midfielder Kim Currie’s corner kick.
“The first one [came off] a corner; our energy was not there, we did not have the mentality we needed to clear it,” Leone said.
Samuelsdottir responded by scoring her fifth goal of the season at 24:50 from 35 yards out, assisted by junior midfielder Hillary Savoy.
Seahawk junior forward Meg Kisser scored her first goal of the season at 39:18 to tie the game going into halftime.
“At halftime we felt like we had lost the game,” Leone said. “We did not recover well from playing such an amazing half but making a couple critical errors that led to goals.”
Seven minutes into the second half, Seahawks leading scorer senior forward Stephanie Rose connected for her first of two goals. Her fifth goal of the season at 52:36 break a 2-2 tie. She rang again at 79:25, adding an insurance goal.
“We were definitely the better team today. I do not have any doubts about that,” Samuelsdottir said. “Hopefully we can just forget about that last half or learn from it and take the good things out of this and realize that we just got to believe that we can do it.”
The Huskies and Seahawks each had 14 total shots, seven of which were on goal for the Huskies. Sophomore goalkeeper Paige Burnett had six saves in the contest, and UNCW senior goalkeeper Caitlin Hunter recorded five saves in the victory.
“We need to be a little more composed [going forward],” Leone said. “We have to continue with our ways that have made us successful in the last couple games which has been keeping the ball really well and we strayed from that in the second half.”
The Huskies hit the road after 2-3 homestand, taking on James Madison University in Virginia tonight at 7 p.m. They’ll return home Oct. 4 to take on the Drexel University Dragons at 4 p.m.
