By Michael McCurdy
New Jersey native and now Hawkeye Alexandra Pecora headed into the weekend hoping to give her family, who made the long trip from her hometown to Iowa City to watch her take on Maryland and Rutgers, two great games.
The Iowa field-hockey team (6-4, 0-3 Big Ten) did just that but lost both games at Grant Field, unable to make its mark on the Big Ten.
The Maryland contest on Sept. 23 was a thriller that saw the game tied with roughly 20 minutes left, leaving the Hawkeyes an opportunity to grab a marquee win.
It was a familiar scene from there on — Maryland was able to score 2 goals at the end, winning 4-2, even though everything seemed to be going Iowa’s way.
The microcosm of the season so far came with approximately 10 minutes left. The Hawkeyes were down 1 goal, and Natalie Cafone fired one of her superb slapshots, which led to a wide open rebound shot from Sophie Plasteras. but she was unable to finish.
Senior Chandler Ackers understood it was a tough loss, but there were a lot of positives to be taken from a competitive game against one of the top teams in the country.
“Even though we lost, it was OK, because we did what we were supposed to do,” she said. “We followed our game plan for the majority of the game, which really helps with our confidence, and if we had capitalized on that rebound shot, we would be in overtime right now with Maryland.”
Iowa head coach Lisa Cellucci said she recognizes that her team battled hard but was unable to come away with the win. She, like Chandler, takes lots of positives away from one of her team’s best tactical games all year.
“I was proud of the effort and that we tactically stuck to what we wanted to do,” she said. “We just didn’t capitalize on the opportunities we had, and then when we went for it to try to tie it up, we had some miscues in our transition defense. That’s going to happen with the youth we had and the lack of depth.”
The game Sunday against Rutgers was a different story. The Hawkeyes lacked energy until a sense of urgency kicked in late in the second half, but it was too late. Iowa lost the contest, 2-1.
If time of possession was a stat in field hockey, the Hawkeyes would have dominated the Scarlet Knights. Though Iowa had more shot attempts, the Hawkeyes could not seem to find the net.
Once Iowa got the ball around the scoring circle, the Rutgers defense tightened and Iowa could not get any open looks at the net.
Cellucci said the Hawkeyes came out with a lackluster effort, and she’s never seen her team play like that before, but Rutgers deserves credit for the win because the Knights came out with energy.
“They played stellar defense, they held their space real well and had tremendous presence,” Cellucci said. “We chose to over and over again dribble into a flat-stick tackle, and we just needed to go out and around, but we were stubborn and tried to go through, and that’s not going to work against a great Rutgers team.”
