RALEIGH, N.C. – The William Peace women's soccer team opened their 2014 regular season campaign at WakeMed Soccer Park Friday night, but unfortunately came up on the short end of the stick vs. the Vixens of Sweet Briar College, 3-0
After playing the Vixens to a 3-3 tie in last year's season opener, WPU committed several miscues defensively and were unable to find an answer for freshman Patricia Garrett, who torched the Pacers for two goals and an assist in her collegiate debut.
Garret struck first and helped the Vixens take a lead right before the end of the first half with some assistance from Stephanie Scott.
Scott froze the defense with a subtle hesitation move, which worked like a quarterback's pump fake in football before she cleverly lobbed it over the defense's backline passing Garrett open on a perfectly timed run towards the goal.
Kayla Kishbaugh made it a 2-0 game in the 78th minute as Garret found her at the backpost with a cross into the box before she put the match away scoring her second goal of the night seven minutes later.
WPU stuck around for the majority of the game but was unable to create any legitimate scoring opportunities for themselves.
WPU goalkeeper, Shannon Maddex, had her hands full this evening, bailing the Pacer's defense out several times which seemed out of sorts minus senior Devin Thompson. Thompson sat out of tonight's game for precautionary measures following a collision during the team's scrimmage this past Tuesday.
Maddex saw 10 shots and made six saves of the nine that were on target. She also took numerous shot attempts away altogeter by either coming off her line to intecept what would otherwise have been point blank attempts or plucking the ball out of mid-air on corner kicks and crosses into the box to limit rebound opportunities.
The Pacers will be back on their home pitch Sunday, August 31 as they take on the Guilford College Quakers at 6:30 p.m.
Stay up to date with William Peace Athletics via social media: Like us on Facebook, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
KEITH JENKINS' POSTGAME THOUGHTS:
"It's a new season, and there are new players coming in that need to get used to the physicallity and speed of the play."
"There were a lot of positives tonight even though we took a loss. I don't think they are 3-0 better than us even though they were much better than they were last year."
"They had one or two players that took us out of what we wanted to do, but I'm very pleased overall with the effort. Now, we build on this and take all the positives into Sunday's match where we'll try to get another result."
"We kept losing our marks defensively, so we have to be able to keep them from getting loose, and we didn't have many shots, so we're missing that final ball into the attacking third. Obviously, we don't have much time to work on that between now and sunday, but non-conference games are basically training sessions, so we take every single match to build and to get ready for conference play."
