With 11 games down and six to go, Penn women’s soccer coach Darren Ambrose took a moment to reflect on his team’s progress thus far.
“We can’t pat ourselves on the back just yet,” he said. “But I am proud of what we’ve been able to do thus far.”
Penn soccer fans may say Ambrose is being too modest about his team’s success — the Quakers have put up eight shutouts in their nine wins, just three clean sheets short of the program’s record of 11, set in 1997. The Red and Blue also defeated Columbia on Friday, 2-0, for the first time since 2007, and it was their first shutout of the Lions since 2004.
The Quakers (9-2-0, 2-1 Ivy) are also one of five teams within one point of the Ivy League lead, making the next few weeks of conference play crucial. Penn’s only conference loss came against Harvard (8-4-1, 3-0). The other loss was against a powerful George Mason squad in September — a defeat that snapped the five-game, five-shutout winning streak with which the Quakers started the season.
“We tend to dwell on things like that, games like that, but we dealt with it and we moved on,” Ambrose said.
The Red and Blue have not been without their challenges, however — the greatest of which has been the number of injuries to the regular starters, including senior captain Ursula Lopez-Palm. In spite of this, Penn has continued to perform — a fact Ambrose attributes to the tenacity and maturity of his younger players.
“There have been significant injuries on the team, and we’re dealing with that every day, in games and in practice,” he said. “But as a consequence, the freshmen have grown a lot in confidence, and they’ve matured a lot playing as much as they have.”
As a result, the Quakers have obtained a depth not typical of many of their peer programs.
Ten different players have scored Penn’s 21 goals on the season. Five of those players have more than one goal, and 13 players in total have at least one point.
Three of the top four point leaders are underclassmen: freshman Megan York and sophomores Kathryn Barth and Kerry Scalora.
Ambrose believes the team’s non-conference schedule has contributed greatly to how well the team has performed both in the Ivy League and overall.
The veteran coach knows all too well how important it is to expose his team to multiple styles of play and give them the tools they need to be able to respond and react to any field situation they may face.
“We look at teams like Villanova and teams like Columbia, and there’s a balance in how we approach them and how we prepare and how we play against them,” Ambrose said. “We give ourselves a broad spectrum of opponents and try and prepare ourselves for what we might see down the road.”
The Quakers will play their last two non-conference matches in the coming weeks: the first today against NJIT (2-10) and the last against Lehigh (6-5-1) on Oct. 26. The matchups will serve both as a respite and a tune-up before the last four Ivy League matches, which begin again Saturday with a home game against Dartmouth.
“We just need to maintain our focus. We just have to grind it out a little bit longer and keep playing our game hard,” Ambrose said. “We need to keep battling.”
