No. 20 Rutgers took seven shots against No. 5 Virginia on Friday and lost 2-1. It took 20 against No. 12 Syracuse on Sunday, spent most of the fourth quarter short-handed, equalized anyway and won 2-1 in a shootout. Same eleven names on the card both days, same margin both days, opposite results. The Scarlet Knights are 2-2, and the two ranked teams they just hosted at the Bauer Complex were the easier half of the stretch. No. 2 Princeton is Friday.
Virginia Needed Six Minutes
Rutgers did not take a shot in the first quarter
on Friday, the second time in four games it has finished an opening quarter with nothing at all. That part was familiar. What was new is that the quarter Rutgers finally generated something was the quarter that decided the game.
Frederique Vernooij inserted a penalty corner at 20:15 and Lauren Iaccio’s shot was blocked. Seventy-eight seconds later Emily Eaton played a long ball into the Rutgers circle and Catalina Quinteros finished it. Vernooij inserted again at 23:27 and took the shot herself, and Nilou Lempers saved it. At 26:54 Virginia sent on Kate Logsdon, and 52 seconds after she walked onto the field she collected the ball with her back to goal, turned and made it 2-0.
Rutgers took three of its five corners for the game in that quarter. It also conceded both goals in it.
Emily Nicholls faced four shots on target and saved two. The two she did not get were the match. The third quarter yielded one Rutgers attempt, Olivia Beattie wide at 41:45, and 15 minutes of the congested midfield both benches had settled into. Shots finished even at 7-7 and Rutgers held a 5-2 edge on corners, which is a reasonable description of a game decided by five minutes and 59 seconds of second-quarter finishing.
The fourth quarter was Rutgers’ only good one, and it produced a goal from the least likely name on the sheet. Laura Loycke, a first-time collegiate starter who had spent the opening two weeks inserting corners for other people, took the insert at 55:53. The ball went to the top, Martha Goodridge sent it back across toward the far post, and Loycke redirected it in at 55:56.
Three seconds from her own insert to her own first collegiate goal.
Rutgers earned another look and kept pressing and found nothing else. Virginia has now won all six meetings between the programs.
Down to Nine, Level in Four Minutes
Sunday opened the way Friday’s second quarter had ended. Taylor Bigbie scored on Syracuse’s first shot of the afternoon at 2:55.
What followed was the best sustained attacking stretch Rutgers has produced this season and, for a long stretch, the least productive. The Scarlet Knights took seven of the next eight shots in the game and scored on none of them. Jessie Eiselin made three saves in the first quarter alone, on Talia Schenck, Sophie Kuiper and Julia Vinas Nieto, and a fourth on Kuiper at 22:03.
Rutgers took three penalty corners inside the first seven minutes of the third quarter and scored on none of them. It also scored on one of them and had it taken away. Olivia Fraticelli put a ball in the net off a Madelyn Kidd insert and lost it on video review, and Belle van de Pas took a green card 61 seconds later, and Rutgers spent the entire two-minute advantage taking two more Kidd corners and watching Eiselin save Lauren Iaccio twice.
Then Rutgers started handing the advantage back. Emma Uprichard, green card, 42:35. Anna Cogdell, yellow card, 48:10, a ten-minute suspension after a collision with Hattie Madden in open field. Frederique Vernooij, green card, 52:03. For two minutes the Scarlet Knights were down to nine field players against a program that has reached the NCAA quarterfinals in two of the last three seasons.
Syracuse tilted the field for most of it. Nicholls made a kick save on van de Pas, another on an Ally Snyder shot from a tight angle, and Elisa Carvajal put the Orange’s second and last corner of the day wide.
Then Rutgers scored anyway.
At 55:13, with three minutes still to run on Cogdell’s suspension, Vernooij lifted an overhead pass down the field and Fraticelli ran onto it, beat the last defender and buried a backhand for her fifth goal in four games. The official scoring summary lists it as unassisted. Head coach Meredith Civico, describing the buildup afterward, credited the overhead directly and called it something the team had trained that week.
Rutgers took two Ella Gandy corners inside the final minute of regulation and Cogdell put the last shot of the fourth quarter over the crossbar as the horn went. Bigbie had picked up a yellow at 59:08, which meant the 15-minute extra period began 11 against 10 and stayed that way for nine minutes. Rutgers outshot Syracuse 6-2 in the extra session and took four more corners, the last two back-to-back at 74:40 and 74:47, both ending with Goodridge shots blocked with 12 seconds left.
The shootout was not close. Rutgers converted its first four attempts and Syracuse converted one. Nicholls, who had made six saves across 75 minutes, was beaten a single time in the tiebreaker, which is a version of a thing she has done before, she stopped three of four for Team USA in the Junior Pan American Cup semifinal in April. Civico said:
“We stayed calm and executed on exactly what we trained,”
Syracuse had come in 3-0 with wins over Fairfield, Northeastern and Ohio State, the last of those on Friday in the same building. It leaves 3-1. For Rutgers it was the highest-ranked win since it beat No. 7 Ohio State on Nov. 7, 2024, the 54th ranked win since 2012, and the first over Syracuse since a double-overtime result on Sept. 10, 2021, only the second in the series since 2004.
Sixteen Corners, One Goal
Rutgers earned five penalty corners on Friday and 11 on Sunday. Sixteen corners in two games against top-12 opposition produced exactly one goal.
Volume is not the problem. Rutgers won the corner count 11-2 against Syracuse and 5-2 against Virginia while being the lower-ranked team on both days. The finishing is the problem. Cogdell took four shots on Sunday and put one on goal. Iaccio, a freshman back, took three and put two on target, both saved. Goodridge took three and had all three blocked. Across the weekend Rutgers put 12 shots on goal and scored twice.
Anna Cogdell has now taken more shots than any other Scarlet Knight in three of the four games this season. She has one goal.
The Card Problem Showed Up a Game Late
This column noted last week that Rutgers had taken four green cards in its opening two games and that it would not survive contact with Virginia. Rutgers took zero cards against Virginia and lost. It took three against Syracuse and won.
That is not a defense of the cards.
Rutgers is at seven in four games, and Sunday’s sequence, a yellow and a green inside four minutes with the team still chasing a goal, is the kind of thing that ends a game against a better opponent. What changed is what happened next. Against Monmouth on opening night, a two-minute suspension turned a one-goal deficit into a two-goal deficit and forced the goalkeeper decision that produced the final scoreline. Against Syracuse, Rutgers equalized while a player short and then spent overtime a player up.
Rutgers travels to No. 2 Princeton on Friday, where Talia Schenck goes back to the program she transferred out of. She had two assists against Wagner and three shots against Syracuse, and she has started all four games. No. 9 UConn comes to Piscataway on Sunday. Five of Rutgers’ first six opponents are ranked, and nine teams on the schedule were ranked in the preseason NFHCA Coaches Poll.
Rutgers found out on Sunday that it can level a game against a top-12 team with nine players on the field.
Friday asks the simpler question, against the second-best team in the country, with eleven.
