Big Green outlast visiting M. Soccer

After being thoroughly outplayed by a highly motivated Cornell squad last week in its Ivy League season opener, the Penn men's soccer team gave a strong effort on Saturday afternoon in its second Ivy contest -- but lost to host Dartmouth (5-2, 2-0 Ivy) in heartbreaking fashion, 1-0. This was the one that got away. The loss dropped Penn to 0-2 in the Ivies and 3-4 overall. It also leaves the Quakers with only five more chances this season to win the first Ivy game of coach Rudy Fuller's career. The deciding -- and only -- goal in the contest did not come until the 86th minute, virtually assuring that the Quakers would suffer their second loss in three games. Dartmouth midfielder Tom Billings -- in a touch of drama worthy of the works of playwright and fellow Stratford-on-Avon, England, native William Shakespeare -- administered the death blow to the Quakers, scoring his first collegiate goal from roughly 25 yards away from the net off a feed from teammate Matt LaBarre. "It was kind of an awkward play," said Penn midfielder Alex Maasry, who gave the Big Green their due credit. "It wasn't like [Dartmouth] strung together anything brilliant. The ball came to the left side and bounced around between a couple players, and then one kid cut to the middle.... I think he shot the ball, and it went off Jeff [Groeber, the Penn keeper's] hands and into the goal." The Quakers were not able to match Dartmouth's tally in the final 3:17 of play after the goal and walked off of Chase Field with a loss. "It's very, very frustrating," Maasry said. "We've been trying to just get that first Ivy win, and we haven't had [an Ivy] win in a long time, and we thought we had a really good opportunity against Dartmouth. "If we had gone up against last year's champion, Princeton or something, and played a really close game and lost 1-0, that'd be one thing, but [this was] a game [with a] team we thought we were better than.... There was a sense on the team that we really weren't going to be scored on, and we were just waiting for us to score a goal." Fuller, while upset with the loss, was happy with the Quakers' effort on Saturday. "To be honest, [the game] wasn't that frustrating at all," Fuller said. "Last Friday at Cornell was a very frustrating game because we clearly played well below what we were capable of. Saturday, we gave it our best shot, Dartmouth gave it [its] best shot, and Dartmouth happened to get the goal." The Quakers -- in addition to playing with the same kind of strong defensive effort that characterized their win over Temple last week -- had opportunities to get that goal and win its first Ivy League game since 1997, despite being outshot 11-7. Penn forward Sam Chamovitz, who scored two goals against Temple, shot the ball just wide of the goal with 15 minutes left in the game. Chamovitz took two of Penn's seven shots. "Any time our team loses, they're upset about it, and I certainly wouldn't want anybody on the team to accept losing," Fuller said. "But what I tried to point out to the team after the game was that we have to become a team that doesn't ride [an] emotional rollercoaster. Until then, if we come out and play like we did last Tuesday against Temple and like we did Saturday against Dartmouth, we're going to win more games than we lose." The Quakers will get their next shot at an Ivy win in two weeks, when they host Columbia on October 14.

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