M. Soccer walk-on scores game winner

On a team in which the coach is named Rudy, it seems fitting that a walk-on freshman with only a couple of minutes of college soccer experience would score his first career goal in front of family and friends to earn Penn its second victory of the season. Playing in the St. Mary's (Calif.) College Fall Soccer Classic, the Quakers (2-8-1) suffered an old-fashioned, 6-0 butchering at the hands of San Francisco (2-10-1) on Friday night. Sunday, however, the Red and Blue rebounded against St. Mary's (5-8), snapping a four-game winless and eight hour-plus scoreless streak with a 1-0 victory. In storybook fashion, David Whitten, a freshman from Mill Valley, Calif., put home the game-winner in the 75th minute to end Penn's scoring drought. Whitten's goal, the fourth on the season for the Quakers, came in front of a crowd of 213 which included two of his sisters and many of his high school friends. "I can't really describe the feeling [of scoring that goal]. You have to experience it -- it's one of the best feelings that there is," Whitten said. "If I had to pick one word to describe it, I'd say 'overwhelming'." The Quakers will have an opportunity to capitalize on Whitten's storybook goal when they take on St. Francis (6-10) today at Rhodes Field at 3:30 p.m. Heading west in search of a break-out win, the Quakers entered Friday night's game at San Francisco's Negoesco Stadium with the hopes that the 1-10 Dons would provide just the opponent necessary to end the Red and Blue's recent skid. Instead, it was San Francisco which had its break-out game. The Dons scored six goals -- their highest scoring output since 1994 and twice the number of Penn's goals on the season -- to stun the Quakers. "Everything they touched was gold, they scored six goals on their first 11 shots," Penn coach Rudy Fuller said. "I think they could've beaten just about anybody in the country that day." The first half was not entirely a mismatch, though, as the Dons were kept scoreless until 33:32, when Inge Klevberg nailed home his third goal of the year. Minutes later, a trip inside the penalty box set up a penalty-kick goal for the Dons Omar El Fakiri. "St. Mary's coach [Mark Talan] watched the San Francisco game and he thought the score should've been the other way in the first half," Fuller said. The Dons erased any doubt in the second half, however, outshooting the Quakers nine-to-one and adding four more goals to run the score to 6-0. "There was no way we could keep the score down, I made seven substitutions and nothing helped," Dons coach Stephen Negoesco, the winningest coach in college soccer history with 523 career victories, said. "I don't think Penn is that bad, but we caught a good day and they caught a bad day, and that's how it goes." Determined not to throw in the towel and destined to salvage the 3,000-mile journey, the Quakers kept their heads up going into the St. Mary's game. "We talked about not letting the San Francisco game end our season or get us down," Penn goalie and tri-captain Mike O'Connor said. "When a game like that happens you just have to put it behind you." In their gutsiest performance to date, the Quakers overcame St. Mary's 17-9 shot advantage to stun the tournament-host Gaels in front of their home crowd. Whitten's second-half goal earned him Philadelphia Soccer 7 Player of the Week honors and made him the obvious choice for the Quakers' Ivy League Honor Roll nod. The unassisted goal was backed by the solid goaltending of Penn freshman Jeff Groeber, who earned the first starting nod of his career, and tri-captain O'Connor, who came off the bench to shut down the Gaels with seven second-half saves. "This is the most meaningful goal in my soccer career. I haven't been playing that much and I finally got a chance to go in and see if I could do something," Whitten said. "I looked up and saw the goalkeeper was way off his line, so I figured I'd take a chance and try to pooch it in behind him. "I took a chance, put it in the air and got lucky. It dropped in behind him and into the net. That was cool." For first-year coach Fuller, the goal proved to be more than "cool." The victory, Fuller's second with the Red and Blue, demonstrated that despite its many struggles, Penn has hardly given up on the '98 season and its five remaining games. "We've been a team that from day one has worked our tail off trying to become a better soccer team. I think many lesser teams would've given up," Fuller said. "You can't put into words the amount of maturing that goes on when you endure a loss like that and then show the commitment and desire to come back and be the tougher team on Sunday. I really get the feeling that we turned the corner this past weekend."