The women's soccer team capped off the season in an all-too-familiar fashion, dropping yet another 1-0 decision to an Ivy League opponent.
The Bears (5-9-1, 2-5-0 Ivy League) fell to the Yale Bulldogs (10-6-0, 5-2-0) on Saturday night. Bruno was trying to play the role of spoiler — the Bulldogs needed a win and a Harvard loss at Columbia to gain a share of the Ivy League Championship. While Harvard ended up getting an overtime win, thus relegating Yale to second place, the Bulldogs still showed off their championship-caliber level of play during the match against Brown.
Yale forward Becky Brown tallied the game's only goal in the 12th minute, after a beautiful run through the center of the field by teammate Kristen Forster. The Bears were unable to get anything going offensively throughout the match. They were held shotless in the second half and managed only one corner kick over the entire 90-minute span.
Despite the end result, midfielder and co-captain Bridget Ballard '10 said she was happywith her teammates' performance.
"I am extremely proud of the effort that everyone put into that game," Ballard said. "Yale is a great team, and we stuck with and, very often, outplayed them, even when we were down 1-0."
Melissa Kim '10, a midfielder who is also a co-captain, agreed.
"We possessed the ball well and had some good chances, but we didn't get the result we wanted," she said. "It was definitely frustrating."
Both seniors also looked back fondly at their last season in a Brown uniform.
"Even though we don't have a winning record, I think that we had a great season," Kim said. "We outplayed a lot of teams and things just didn't go our way. We worked extremely hard and played really well and it's unfortunate that our record doesn't show that."
The Bears finished the year seventh in the Ivy League standings, ahead of only Cornell. But Ballard looked beyond Bruno's record when recapping her senior season.
"This team was, without a doubt, the most cohesive team I have ever been on," she said. "Despite not ending up with the record that we had hoped, I am amazed at the composure, intensity and the attitude we took into every game."
