The women's soccer team finally encountered an opponent it couldn't overcome - luck.
After winning every one of its games for nearly a month straight, Tufts learned that there's a certain aspect of good fortune in all winning streaks. And unfortunately for the Jumbos, the cards were stacked against them on Saturday.
Despite launching 18 shots - 12 in the second half alone - Tufts fell 1-0 to Trinity on Kraft Field this weekend, suffering its first conference loss to fall behind NESCAC-leading Williams, who beat Middlebury 4-0 on Saturday.
"We're a better team; we definitely outworked them," senior co-captain Martha Furtek said. "The luck's been on our side all season and it just wasn't today, and that's too bad. But we're not getting down on this - we just need to come out harder and prove ourselves this week and next weekend."
As smoothly as everything had fallen into place for Tufts in the previous eight wins, Saturday proved that even the best of teams can't afford to squander their opportunities.
"[Trinity] did well, but to be honest, I think most of the problem lied with our inability to capitalize on a lot of our offensive opportunities," senior Lauren Fedore said. "They fought really hard back there; we had a lot of scrambles back there that they were able to get out of the goal, but I think that it was more a problem of our inability to shoot rather than their defense."
To the Bantams' credit, all they needed were two shots to take the lead. Their lone second-half shot 11 minutes into the frame was all the offense necessary to hold Tufts at bay.
Apart from that goal, the Jumbos maintained the ball on their offensive side for the majority of the game - especially in the second half - but Saturday proved to be a day of almosts, as they never found the back of the net.
Of the missed opportunities, each half was marked by one close call in particular. The first frame's moment occurred with 23 minutes remaining, when sophomore Ali Maxwell crossed the ball to Fedore in the middle, who smashed the ball off the top of the crossbar.
"[Maxwell] always does a great job of bringing it down to the endline and crossing it in the middle," Fedore said. "She looked up and she saw me, and I just had to slide a little to get it. I had someone on my back and I guess I slid up, and when you lean back, you hit the ball up."
The second half saw an even more frustratingly close call for Tufts. With just over 26 minutes left, the Bantams were called for a handball in the box, setting up senior Joelle Emery to take a penalty kick, which she hadn't missed all season. But as was theme of the day, the Jumbos ended up on the wrong side of an exceptional play, as Trinity's freshman goalie Emily Weeden dove to her right to keep the ball in front of the goal line.
"The keeper guessed right," coach Martha Whiting said. "She jumped early - keepers can jump before the ball is kicked - and she jumped sideways and she just got to the spot...it's really hard to score when a keeper jumps early. She was just there before the ball was. Joelle can take our next one - I just have such confidence in her."
Although the Jumbos ultimately shot themselves in the foot, Trinity sufficiently neutralized sophomore Cara Cadigan, the NESCAC's leading scorer and Tufts' main offensive threat this season. For the first time in eight games, Cadigan failed to score - a credit to the Bantams' defense, which ranked second in the league in fewest goals allowed coming into Saturday.
"They were marking her pretty tightly, and they also had a person directly behind her, so even when she beat her first defender, there was someone behind her," Emery said. "She was basically having to take a few people on every time."
Still, Cadigan was able to get off four shots in the game and created plenty of opportunities for her teammates.
"Every team has Cara's number at this point, which isn't a surprise," Furtek said. "And despite them having two men on her back every time she got the ball, she still created opportunities and she did a great job of adjusting her game.
"With two people on her back she can't turn every time and just beat everyone on a dribble," she continued. "She did a great job of passing the ball back and looking to make passes rather than beat people on a dribble."
Although Cadigan's goal late in the second half of Wednesday's 1-0 win over Wesleyan was enough to pull out the team's eighth consecutive win, Saturday essentially marked the second straight game in which the squad had difficulty finding the goal.
"Obviously we're having trouble putting the ball in the back of the net, but I don't think that that is a result of us not working well together," Furtek said. "We're still putting great plays together and we're creating an offense for ourselves; we just have to work on finishing, and that's going to come. We know we can do it - we've had some really successful games like Bowdoin [Oct. 6] when we scored four goals."
Before Saturday's all-important Williams game, the squad will have a chance to get its offense back on track Wednesday when Keene State visits Kraft Field for a rematch of last season's game, in which the Owls halted a six-game Tufts winning streak with a shocking 5-2 win.
"I don't even care about them and how they're playing, as long as we can play and execute our game plan," Whiting said. "I'm confident that we can beat anybody and last year's game was just an odd game. We didn't play well and they played phenomenal. But I don't anticipate anything like that happening again. And especially coming off of this loss, we're going to be so fired up."
