Cabrini women’s soccer team took on the Notre Dame of Maryland University for a CSAC showdown and was able to come out victorious. Cabrini came into the game looking for their second win in the conference and put a lot of pressure against the Gators’ 15 women roster.
“Well, we knew they didn’t have a large roster so we knew we were going to use a lot of the depth of the bench so we went twenty players deep,” head coach Ken Prothero said.
It seemed as though throughout the game Cabrini had the Gators on their heels every possession and had many opportunities to score. Cabrini had 24 total shots during the game with 11 on goal shots and 14 corners. The defense held the Notre Dame to only two total shots for the entire game. With so many shot opportunities on goal for Cabrini, they were finally able to put one through the net as freshman walk on forward Payton Greene scored the first collegiate goal in her career to give Cabrini a 1-0 lead.
“I was super excited when I scored my first collegiate goal,” Greene said. “What happened was Kelsey Tironi took a shot on net and it ended up hitting the posting and the ball came right towards me and I hit the ball back into the net.”
Later in the game, senior midfielder/forward Allie Vallen would score a goal of her own assisted from junior midfielder Brittany Runyen to Cabrini a commanding 2-0 lead. After the win, team captain Runyen explained some of the key moments that helped them get the victory.
“Some of the biggest keys was that we felt confident the whole time so we had a scoring chance,” Runyen said. “We have to capitalize and keep it down here and make sure we keeping driving it high. We did a better job at driving it the second half because we kept it on our minds and stayed focused.”
Not only did the Cabrini women’s soccer team get the win today, they displayed major improvement from the beginning of the season to now.
“100% improvement. The beginning of the season our team didn’t have chemistry,” Runyen said. “We didn’t really know who was going to be where, but as each game goes on we keep getting a lot better at it. We still are not where we want to be, but we keep taking big steps towards reaching perfection.”
For Cabrini’s next opponent, they will be facing Neumann University on Saturday, Oct. 1st. Coach Prothero knows that it will be a battle from start to finish.
“Neumann is going to be a lot different in terms of we’ve been battling these teams all season but Neuman is going to be more like a war,” Prothero said. “They’re going to be a lot more aggressive, they’re going to play a lot harder, so every 50/50 will probably be much more valuable. We can’t make as many mistakes and expect to recover from them so we’re going to have to finish on less opportunities in order to beat a squad like Neumann who does not like us very much.”
“We’ve beaten them a couple of times, at their place a couple of years ago for the (CSAC) championship so they are going to be coming at us,” Prothero said. “If we’re not ready it’s going to be a long day.”
