M. Soccer falls at Cornell

Heading into this season, Penn men's soccer coach Rudy Fuller was still waiting for his first Ivy League win in two years of trying. He'll have to wait a bit longer. His Quakers opened up their Ivy season on Friday evening with a disappointing 4-2 loss to Cornell (3-2, 1-0 Ivy) in Ithaca, N.Y. The defeat drops Penn to 0-1 in the Ivies and 2-3 overall. Penn, which has the most talent of any Quakers team in years, has been inconsistent up to this point in its young season. After winning a solid game against East Carolina in Richmond, the Quakers played a listless game in which they were dominated by the Big Red. Cornell took 23 shots on goal compared to Penn's 10, and had eight corner kicks, as opposed to Penn's three. "Personally, I was extremely pissed off at everyone on our team for the effort, including myself," Penn goalkeeper Jeff Groeber said. "I think the whole team was pissed off at the way we came out. We just didn't come out and give the effort, and everyone knew it." Despite their anemic play, at one point the Quakers thought they might go into halftime tied at two. After two quick early goals put his team in an early 2-0 hole, Penn forward Sam Chamovitz deposited a pass from fellow forward Billy Libby into the left side of the net at the 36:14 mark of the game, cutting the Big Red lead in half. Seconds later, a Cornell foul gave Penn captain Henry Chen a free kick and a chance to tie the game, but Chen's effort hit the goalpost and bounced away. In the 38th minute -- less than two minutes after Penn scored its first goal and then almost tied the game -- Cornell forward Ted Papadopoulos took a pass from teammate Rick Stimpson and headed it past Groeber, giving the Big Red a 3-1 lead. Two minutes after that, Cornell forward Adam Skumawitz delivered the death blow, scoring on a pass from Papadopoulos to make it 4-1. "To go from being in a situation where it would have been 2-2, to walking into halftime down 4-1 are two quite different scenarios," Fuller said. "Sitting on the sideline, for as poorly as we had played, to go into the locker room down 2-1, we would have been in pretty good shape." While Fuller gave Cornell credit for beating his team, he felt that both of the Big Red's scoring spurts -- the one to begin the game and the one to end the first half -- sprang from a lack of defensive effort on Penn's part. "On the defensive end, it was a very bad day for us," Fuller said. "The type of goals that Cornell scored were purely based on effort. They had less to do with skillful play and more to do with just being first to crosses." Skumawitz was first to one of those crosses at the 10:13 mark, heading a pass from Cornell midfielder Ian Pilarski past Groeber to open the scoring. Foreshadowing the events of the close of the first half with a touch Hitchcock would have been proud of, midfielder David Briefel beat the Quakers only two minutes after Skumawitz did, putting the ball into the net at the 12:20 mark. Cornell had a 2-0 lead at that point, and except for that short stretch when it looked as if the Quakers would surge, it never looked back. Chen scored on a penalty kick midway through the second half, but for Penn, the evening had already come to an early end. "Even [the] morning of the game, I know I was feeling very confident, and the guys were feeling very good about their chances as well," Fuller said. "And for whatever reason, we went to the game and really got outworked. We need to sit down and look at how we're preparing for games and how we're approaching games and see if there's something there we can change." To this end, the Quakers looked at game film yesterday from Friday night's loss and practiced defensive clears in an effort to prepare for their game with Temple tomorrow and their second Ivy League match at Dartmouth on Saturday. "I certainly hope that we really take this to heart and learn from it," Fuller said. "I would expect the guys to come out on Tuesday with a very good effort against Temple."

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