The team gathers for the before the last game ever playing in the ACC division at the Maryland vs. Pittsburg game.
The Terrapins women’s soccer team entered this season poised for a deep postseason run.
The Terps returned seven of 11 starters, including their leading scorer, from a team that advanced to the NCAA tournament second round. Coach Jonathan Morgan was entering his second season as head coach. The expectations only increased when the Terps started the season at No. 17 in the National Soccer Coaches Association of America rankings.
The Terps’ 4-0 start did nothing to dampen expectations. The early season promise, however, failed to endure, as the team experienced scoring woes and had trouble defending when the competition level rose. As a result, the Terps failed to make the 64-team NCAA tournament for the first time in five years, despite reaching the eight-team ACC tournament.
“We have a lot of talent,” Morgan said Monday after the NCAA selection show. “We gave away too many games this year. Games we had under control. Games we were dominant in. … We let those games slip away.”
The Terps, Morgan said, couldn’t finish out wins. The inexperience of nine starting underclassmen showed at times — what might have been close victories a year ago turned into narrow defeats.
“This season’s been sort of frustrating because we’ve been playing well, but we just aren’t getting the results,” forward Alex Doody said after a 3-1 win over Pittsburgh on Oct. 31. “We try our absolutely hardest. Sometimes we are unlucky and don’t get the result we deserve.”
Morgan specifically pointed to one-goal losses against Santa Clara, Duke and Boston College as matches that should have gone differently. Despite dominating portions of the matches against the Blue Devils and Eagles, the Terps lost those crucial conferences matches, damaging their NCAA resume and leaving them with few quality wins.
In those two conference losses, the Terps allowed goals off corners and scored just once despite creating numerous goal-scoring opportunities, problems that plagued the Terps this season after an initial scoring outburst.
As the Terps entered ACC play, a consistent complementary attacking option for forward Hayley Brock, the third-highest scorer in program history, never emerged. Brock’s 12 goals were double that of the Terps’ second-highest scorer, midfielder Ashley Spivey.
After averaging three goals per game in six nonconference matches, including a 9-0 rout of The Citadel in the season opener Aug. 23, the Terps scored just 1.21 goals per game against conference opponents in the last 14 games.
Injuries played a role. Brock and Spivey each missed two games because of injuries. Forward Gabby Galanti tore her ACL in the fifth match of the season, a 1-0 loss to Santa Clara. Midfielder Alex Reed missed the beginning of the season because of injury, meaning that the Terps’ top four returning scorers all missed multiple games because of injury.
“We still had kids here that were talented,” Morgan said. “For whatever reason they didn’t mesh that well. Then, Hayley and Ashley start getting things tighter. … Then, when those two started to peak with one another, they didn’t get a chance to play together because of injuries.”
The offense wasn’t the only area at fault for a disappointing season. Morgan said the Terps’ inability to defend corners, along with giveaways in the defensive half, belied a lack of discipline.
The Terps allowed eight goals — 26 percent of their opponents’ scores — off corners. There was also a stretch of four games from Sept. 26 to Oct. 6, in which five of the nine goals the Terps allowed occurred because of miscues in the defensive half.
“We aren’t a very disciplined team,” Morgan said. “We gave up a lot of goals getting stripped out the back. We gave up a lot of goals on set plays. That’s about discipline. That’s about toughness.”
The Terps’ failure to live up to preseason expectations stems from many areas. In the end, they feasted on lower-level competition, but were unable to win enough games against quality opponents to receive an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament, something Morgan recognized after the Terps’ final game, a 6-1 loss at Virginia in the ACC quarterfinals Nov. 3.
“We won the games we are suppose to win,” Morgan said after that game. “Some of the games that could’ve gone either way we unfortunately haven’t had those results.”
