by Dan Rosenfield
Springtime is rest time for the Delaware Women’s Club Soccer team. They only played 3 sets of games in the season of new beginnings, first being a tournament in mid-May. They swept their competition 1-0 both games which included UPenn and George Washington University at Frazier Field behind the Little Bob in Newark. The first game came down to crunch time as Freshman Sarah Quiqley was able to put in the only goal of the game in the last two minutes of play. In the following game against George Washington, Maggie Ford scored in the game’s first 10 minutes, and UD was able to hold the lead until the final whistle.
Back to back games are nothing new for the team. They have been used to tournaments like this for a while.
“I think we are pretty OK with playing multiple games, because we do this all the time,” freshman defender Caelan Corey said. “We’ve pretty much grown up playing multiple games in tournaments and stuff when were little.”
In both games, each goal came at opposite ends of the clock, which can create a different mindset throughout each game.
“When you get a goal in the very end, it’s kind of like a stress reliever because you’re worried you might tie or might lose but then you get that goal,” Corey said. “Getting the goal in the first couple of minutes, that also kind of boosts moral because you think like ‘oh we can do this like we just did so we can do it again.’”
“We scored at the end of the first game and the end of the second game so it was kind of like a back to back thing,” junior forward Sierra Enea said. “We were just riding that high.”
Sierra Enea in the middle of kicking a corner
For Enea and Corey, they immediately sought out the ultra competitive club team when they came to Delaware. Enea was initially looking to be on the Division 1 team but after the former Head Coach, Scott Grzenda, resigned, she thought club would be the best fit.
“It was really shaky communication wise, and then I was like ‘alright let me just join club, go out and have fun’ and then joined the team, super competitive, traveled the first 2 years and it was just like all inh from there and as soon as I got to tryouts I knew it was for me,” Enea said.”
Corey could not bare the idea of not playing soccer in college.
“I’ve been playing soccer for my entire life so I wasn’t really ready for the full commitment of the full D1 team but, I definitely knew I wanted to play soccer in college because I couldn’t just drop it like that,” Corey said.
Both of them had to go through tough tryouts to make the team. When Enea tried out, only 7 girls out of 40 made it. Corey’s year, there were only 4 girls out of 90.
They only had one other game in the spring, tying Towson University 2-2 in early April. The team looks to use the momentum from the spring to make regionals in the fall.