After some fine tuning, Penn women’s soccer coach Darren Ambrose believes his team is ready for Ivy League play — again.
Days removed from an easy win over a lowly UMBC team, the Quakers (4-2-2, 0-1 Ivy) will now look for their first Ivy win today against Cornell (1-7-1, 0-1). Sunday, the action continues when Army (5-4-1) visits Rhodes Field.
The importance of Tuesday’s dominating performance — which saw Penn outshoot the Retrievers, 28-4 — cannot be understated, especially after a tough Ivy-opening loss to Harvard less than a week ago.
“We needed that [UMBC] game,” Ambrose said. “I think we’re a lot better now than we were last Saturday as a team.
“We’ve got a better sense of what we’re about right now. I think we’ve begun to figure out our identity and how we play as a team.”
Another team searching for its identity is the Big Red, which also dropped its first Ivy match, 1-0, to Columbia. Cornell has scored just six goals in its nine games this season.
Penn hasn’t lost to Cornell since 1996, but that won’t affect how they prepare for today’s match, according to Ambrose.
“I don’t care if we’ve lost every game to Cornell,” he said. “I don’t like to get into streaks and things like that because every game is difficult.”
Today’s challenge will be dealing with the Big Red’s talented youth. All six of the team’s goals have been scored by underclassmen, including two each by freshmen Hannah Labadie and Maneesha Chitanvis.
The Red and Blue, on the other hand, have used senior leadership to lead the Ivy League in goals per game (2.38). Well, mainly the leadership of one senior: Jessica Fuccello.
Fuccello scored yet again Tuesday, adding to her Ivy-leading total, which now sits at 10. Against UMBC, she received help from sophomore forward Marin McDermott, who netted two goals of her own.
Fuccello laughed off questions of having to shoulder the scoring load, but added, “I like when other people score.”
The senior will face a challenge Sunday against Army goalie Alex Lostetter, who enters play this weekend with an .866 save percentage — which is good enough for fourth in the Patriot League, but would put her second in the Ivy League.
If Fuccello follows her coach’s advice, she won’t be looking ahead.
“We rarely ever … speak about another opponent when we’re playing one before that,” Ambrose said. “There are too many games that are so important that you can’t afford to put any other energy into another opponent before you play the one you’re facing.”
Fuccello’s sole focus for now is simply getting Ivy vengeance.
“All of us were pretty disappointed [after the Harvard match] so I think we’re gonna use it as fuel to light the fire,” she said. “We’re [still] pretty mad so we’re gonna take that out on Cornell.”
