With wins against Lock Haven and No. 6 Penn State, the Terrapin field hockey team has shown it’s ready to start the season.
Now, the Terps need to show they are ready to start games.
After two contests, the team has just one first-half goal to its credit. Still, the Terps’ defense and second-half play has lifted them to victory.
“It’s hard to explain,” sophomore midfielder Katie O’Donnell said. “We get out of the first half and realize we aren’t playing as well as we could, then something just starts to click in the second half.
“We go into the second half with great momentum and our skills are just on, but we need to work on getting into the first half the same way,” she added.
The Terps’ lone first-half goal came in the opener against an inferior Lock Haven squad. Senior back Susie Rowe converted a penalty stroke in the seventh minute, but at the end of the first half they held only a 6-4 shot advantage and a 3-2 advantage on penalty corners.
Against Penn State, the Terps were held without a shot for the first 10 minutes of the game.
But it is early in the season and, despite the sluggish starts, coach Missy Meharg is confident the team will improve.
“I’ll tell you what: I’m not concerned at all,” Meharg said. “I think that you have to look at hockey as a game of mental resilience and no matter what the score is at the end of the game, somebody has more than somebody else. If they don’t, you play overtime.”
The wait-and-see approach is understandable from the coach of a team with a bevy of offensive talent. It seems only a matter of time before the team, which returned its top three goal-scorers from 2007, starts putting points on the board early and often.
To be fair, the match with Penn State was expected to be a low-scoring affair. The Nittany Lions topped the Terps 1-0 in last season’s national quarterfinal. And with the team shutting out its first two opponents, an offensive barrage has not been required.
“We have some work to do with goal scoring,” Meharg said. “But at the end of the day, I think something to be concerned about would be statistics at the other end of the field.”
Junior goalkeeper Alicia Grater said the slow starts have put the team in a position to learn and grow.
“Against Penn State it was a tough-fought game,” Grater said. “To be able to pull it out gives you confidence in your teammates that you don’t mind when you’re under pressure and you can find a way to make it work.”
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