M. Soccer opens season with a shutout

Penn up-ended preseason favorite and defending Ivy League Champion Harvard, 1-0, on a Stevie Cohen goal in 71st minute. While fans may be witnessing a changing of the guards in Ivy League soccer, it is still a bit early for the crowning of a new king. The Penn men's soccer team (1-0, 1-0 Ivy League) did, however, take the first step toward a coronation this weekend with a 1-0 victory over defending Ivy League champion Harvard in the opening game of the season before a crowd of 1,100 at Ohiri Field in Cambridge, Mass. Last season, the Quakers started up with a 1-5 record, before finishing 8-6-1, 4-3 in the Ivy League -- which was good enough to tie for second place. Opening the season with a win against a quality division rival validated the team's optimism. "What we're looking for this year is the same attitude the players had when we went 7-1-1 in the last nine games of last season," Penn coach George O'Neill said. "We want to take that same effort, thought and focus and apply it to this season." The lone goal of the game came in the 71st minute, when junior midfielder Stevie Cohen put the game-winner past Crimson keeper Jordan Dupuis. Quakers senior forward Jason Smoke played the ball on goal, and Cohen's shot came on a volley inside the six-yard box off of a rebound from an attempted punch-clear by Dupuis. Sophomore goalkeeper Michael O'Connor was tested early and often in the first half, as the Quakers were outshot, 10-3. Harvard kept the ball in Penn's defensive zone for a good part of the first half, but were unable to find the back of the net. O'Connor made several brilliant saves to keep Penn in the game. "The whole first half, the ball was in our end a lot," O'Connor said. "They really had all of the offensive pressure, and had a lot of opportunities, but the defense came up pretty big, and I came up big a couple of times." O'Connor, the 1996 Ivy League Rookie of the Year, made five saves en route to his fifth-career league shutout. In the second half, however, the Quakers offense picked up. Before Cohen's goal, the Red and Blue had several good scoring chances of their own. Even after the Quakers did score, they were unrelenting and continued to run the ball at the exhausted Crimson defense. They were unable to capitalize on several opportunities to add to the lead. "We might have been giving them too much space in the middle of the field," said O'Neill, discussing his halftime speech to the squad. "I told them that they certainly have to respect every team that we play, but that they were every bit as good, and I believe that we are better. I told them to close the gap when (Harvard) has the ball, to mark up tighter and put pressure on the ball, to go at the ball quick, to double team and to try and steal the ball. Then we started doing that, and we had a lot more possession in the second half." Another positive sign for O'Neill was the strength of his bench play. Seventeen of the 18 players who made the trip saw playing time and freshman midfielder Henry Chen started the game for Penn. Despite the Quakers having beaten the defending Ivy League champions -- a team predicted by many to repeat -- the Penn players are turning some heads but refuse to look too far down the road at a possible title of their own. "We're trying not to let this get to our heads too much," O'Connor said. "We really just want to take things one game at a time. I think we are establishing ourselves and getting a lot of respect throughout the league -- a respect that we hadn't had in years past.