The Penn women's lacrosse team will be back on its home turf tomorrow when Cornell travels to Philadelphia to take on the reeling Quakers.
The Red and Blue have lost their last three games and five of their last six to drop to a disappointing 2-5.
Cornell enters the game ranked No. 7 in the nation, but could be a welcome relief for Penn -- who was last in action against the best team in the nation when Loyola defeated the Quakers, 12-3, on Tuesday.
The Big Red has used its impressive offense to pace their 5-0 start. Cornell is currently averaging 15.8 goals per game.
"We have several different defenses that we play all the time," Penn senior Christy Bennett said. "We don't come up with special defenses for different teams, we're just going to focus on what we do best."
Leading the way for Cornell is senior attacker Sarah Averson. A preseason All-American, Averson has lived up to the hype having scored 18 goals and assisted on six others.
Contributing to Averson's success are juniors Sarah Fisher and Jamie Quinn. The two are second and third respectively on the team in scoring with 14 and 13 goals each.
However, most of the Quakers are far more concerned with their own offensive performance than that of their opponent.
"We played some teams that are ranked and didn't really play up to our potential," senior Whitney Horton said. "The Temple loss was really disappointing and the Yale loss was really disappointing."
Two of the biggest problems that have been brought to light lately are Penn's inability to put shots in the net and also their seeming lack of confidence.
"Our shooting percentage has to get better, we need to finish," Horton said. "We take a lot of shots, but we haven't been shooting well, but the opportunities are there."
The Quakers have actually outshot three of the opponents that eventually went on to beat them -- Yale, Temple and Johns Hopkins.
Currently the Red and Blue are shooting 35.6 percent while opponents are scoring on 41.5 percent of their shots.
"Shooting is something like basketball -- you're not going to get enough shots at practice. You have to want to do it on your own," Penn coach Karin Brower said. "We're just not good shooters right now and we need to improve on that the most."
The player's confidence has also taken a hit during the recent struggles.
Losses to highly ranked opponents No. 1 Loyola and No. 2 Duke have left some of the players stumbling as they head into the heart of the Ivy League schedule.
"We have to go and play with confidence, that's the one game that we didn't do against Loyola," Horton said. "We can win all the games we have left this season, we just have to go out thinking we can win."
If Penn wants to break into the Ivy League win column this weekend they will have to shoot much better than they have been recently and hope an increase in goal-scoring will aid in boosting team morale.
