If there were ever a time for a wake-up call, this might have been it.
On Wednesday, the men's soccer team saw its four-game winning streak cruelly snapped by La Salle. After going 2-0 up against the Explorers, Penn (4-2-0) conceded three straight to its city rival and fell, 3-2.
Now, with Harvard (5-2-0) coming to Rhodes Field tomorrow to open the Ivy season, coach Rudy Fuller's team needs to regroup, and fast.
"Sometimes, when you're rolling along, you get a little bit of a false sense of security about where you are as a team," Fuller said. "And we're not near the finished product. This allows us to get a long, hard look at ourselves going into the Harvard game."
Penn seemed fairly capable of creating chances on the offensive end - even when La Salle was in control of the game, the Quakers looked threatening at times. But the mistakes on the back line are what doomed Penn.
La Salle didn't allow the Quakers to get away with those miscues, and it's not likely that Harvard will either.
Most notably, the Crimson has last year's Ivy League Player of the Year, forward Charles Altchek, back for his senior season.
One season removed from tallying 11 goals in 16 games (the league's second-leading scorers had 7), Altchek now wears the captain's armband and already has three goals on the campaign.
The Quakers also have history to conquer. Last year, in Boston, they fell behind 2-0 and came just short of the Crimson, losing 3-2.
"There's going to be a lot at stake [tomorrow] night," Harvard coach John Kerr observed in an interview with Harvard Athletics. "For the neutral observer, it should be a really exciting match."
Only three of Penn's seven league games are at home this year, and one of them is against Ivy co-champion Brown. And the toughest part of the schedule, in which Penn plays all three co-champions in a two-week span, is still to come. So there's no better time than now for the Red and Blue to pick up three points in league play.
More fundamentally, though, Penn needs to bounce back mentally from Wednesday's letdown.
"It's a huge test of character for us," junior defender Andy Howard said. "We showed an extreme lack of character [against La Salle], but I know this team has a lot more.
"We've showed character in the past, in putting teams away," Howard added, referencing last Sunday's game against Duquesne in which Penn held on to a 1-0 lead against furious pressure from the Dukes throughout the second half.
"I think we can regroup and get back to what we do well."
