Soccer continues to struggle : Fatigue An Issue

The Southern University Jaguar women’s soccer team will wait another couple of days to get their elusive first win of the season. The Lady Jaguars traveled to Hattiesburg, Mississippi to face the University of Southern Mississippi. They gave a much more valiant effort than last game, losing this one 0-4, bringing their season record to 0-8.
The team has become the mirror image of the football team, enduring the struggles of all types of injuries and eligibility issues. As a result of these problems, the roster has worn thin.
In Sunday’s match, nine players played the whole duration of the match, including goalie Sarah Forde. The Jaguars were outshot again 26-3. Being outshot provides opportunities for your goalie to get better, as Forde finished with 10 saves.
The team continued to play another episode of in house musical chairs; shuffling players to accommodate key pieces missing in action. They were only able to rotate 4 players, while Southern Miss used a bevy of rotations that ultimately wore the Jaguars down.
The game was scoreless at the end of the first period. That scoreless halftime gave the Lady Jags some hope going into to half time that they could indeed upset Southern Miss, and get their first win.
However, as the second period progressed fatigue became an issue; and so did depth. Southern Miss outlasted the Jaguars, as the period grew on Southern ran out of gas. That led to Southern Miss producing 4 goals in the second period.
Southern Miss scored goals in the 55th, 58th, 79th, and 84th minutes, with the last two coming near the end of the match.
“We need to get better at the fundamentals and passing to become more of an offensive threat because defense looked really well. We lost a couple of players to injuries so we were shuffling players into new roles trying to fill the spots that needed to be replaced. Also, we focus on winning as a team; but two bright spots this weekend was goalie Sarah Forde, who had 5 or 6 phenomenal saves and Shelby Carbin who played really well on the defensive end,” said Head Coach Courtnie Prather.
Now, they can look forward to conference play.
The lost against Southern Miss was the last non-conference game. A tough non-conference schedule it was, with the team going 0-8. They did show some promise against tougher opponents, which is a plus going into conference play. These rigorous non-conference matches should help the Jags be a tough team in the conference. Definitely a tough, defensive team; lead by Shelby Carbin on that end of the field. It should be an arduous task scoring on the Jaguars in conference play as well, due to the play of goalie Sarah Forde. The only struggle for the team will be scoring against conference foes. The jaguars had far too many scoreless outings in their non-conference matches; going scoreless in 7 of its 8 matches. Once they get the offense on the same page as the defense look for a potentially dangerous defensive Southern Jaguar soccer team.
The Lady Jags (0-8) will gear up and bring their impressive defense to face Grambling State (0-3) in their first SWAC outing on Friday September 26 at 3:00pm at A.W. Mumford Stadium.