What a weekend for Jessica Fuccello.
The freshman forward notched two game-winners over the weekend when the Quakers traveled to play UNC-Greensboro and East Carolina. The two wins kept the Quakers' undefeated season alive, moving them to 4-0-1 overall.
"I was kind of on a streak of non-scoring," Fuccello said. "It felt good to get my first college goal as the game-winner."
This first tally came off of a header on Friday in Greensboro, putting Penn ahead 3-2 and completing a run of three unanswered goals in the 72nd minute to put away the Spartans (1-8-1).
As if this weren't enough, Fuccello did it again yesterday to score the only goal of the game and put away East Carolina (4-4) on a breakaway with just eight minutes left in regulation.
This breakout weekend didn't take coach Darren Ambrose completely by surprise.
"We knew when we recruited her she was a goal scorer," Ambrose said. "We told her, 'Once you get one, you'll start scoring more.'"
The Quakers were fortunate that Fuccello stepped up at the right time, as the weekend could have easily turned out to be a disappointment.
After a long bus trip to Greensboro, Penn came out flat against the Spartans and gave up two goals within the first five minutes.
But instead of getting flustered, the Quakers got into a groove, and one of their nine shots on goal found the back of the net before halftime - junior defender Rachel Fletcher tallied her second goal of the season on a shot from inside the box.
"If you're going to go down 2-0 in any kind of game, you want to go down early," Ambrose said. "I think it served as a wake-up call. . I don't think we ever really panicked."
Yesterday, it was a completely different story. Instead of a shootout, East Carolina fought Penn to a stalemate.
Between them, the two teams managed only five shots on goal, and the Quakers may have seemed a bit lost. This was due, at least in part, to the strange dimensions of Greenville, N.C.'s, Bunting Field.
If the travel and heat weren't enough for the Red and Blue to deal with, the narrow width of the field was sure to take the team out of its comfort zone.
"It made a difference in how we had to play and it took us a while to figure it out," Ambrose said.
This may have been the story of the weekend for Penn, which had to make adjustments from start to finish. But the Quakers still managed to put together a pretty respectable performance.
"I'm very proud of the way we handled ourselves over a long weekend," Ambrose said. "We dealt with a lot of things. . Eighty percent of the weekend we played very, very good soccer."
Fortunately for the Quakers, that was enough.
