The women’s soccer team from UW-Whitewater fought hard against the players from UW-Stevens Point, but ultimately came up short. The final score was 3-1, with the Warhawks managing to obtain one goal in the first half from junior midfielder Emily Thill.

Her goal was a quick response to Stevens Point’s first goal early in the first half. The rest of the half consisted of good passing and connections from the Warhawks, but a fairly evenly matched game. Late in the second half Stevens Point acquired their second goal, and Whitewater went into halftime down by one goal. 

“I thought we were really strong in the first 15 to 20 minutes, even when we gave up the goal,” head coach Dan Montanye said. “I thought that we were pretty much in control of that first 20 minutes and could have gotten two or three more ourselves. Unfortunately, when you are on the front foot, you have to take advantage of that and get your goals when they’re there for you. The other team credit to them, they started to play themselves into the game, and they certainly upped their level and I think that was a big contributing factor to the defeat.”

The second half was where the team started losing their connections. It was becoming more difficult for Whitewater to find each other, so both teams ended up battling for loose balls quite often. Stevens Point scored their goal off of a corner kick that was a result of that.

“I liked the urgency,” Montanye said. “There’s no doubt there was a lot of fight in the team today. Not the result that we wanted, but I’m never gonna question the effort and the will to win.”

The team atmosphere was definitely there as Montanye mentioned, with the women making sure to be there for each other and support the way they all play on the field.

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“We always have good team chemistry on and off the field,” senior midfielder Megan Howard said. “It’s just fixing little things on the field to get the ball in the back of the net. Those were some things that we needed to work on. This week, we’ll come back and play our next game.”

As always with a loss, the team is just looking forward to their new competition that brings different players and a different game.

“It’s a completely different game,” Howard said. “We leave this one in the past and we look positive towards the next game. We know what we need to work on and we will work on it in practice, and we’ll be ready to bring it to the next game without a doubt.”

Coach also notes some aspects the team could work on, especially for their next game which is Wednesday Oct. 18 against UW-Platteville. 

“We’ve kind of talked about it as a group,” Montanye said. “There’s a couple of things that we want to fine tune. I told them that it’s about the little details that really can make it make a big difference in getting the result that we want. The next time we step out in the field. It’s about really focusing on the next couple of days, having a couple of good training sessions, so that we can have a good mindset going into the next game.”