IU heads north for conference play

Less than a week removed from its first conference loss, a humbling 4-1 defeat at the hands of Penn State, the women's soccer team will look to rebound on the road when it travels to Minnesota to play the Golden Gophers at 7 p.m. tonight.\nIU (5-2-1, 2-1-1) finds itself tied for second place in the Big Ten with No. 7 PSU. Meanwhile, Minnesota (3-5-0, 2-2-0) is in a three-way tie for third, making tonight's game critical to both teams. \nThe Hoosiers enter the game confident about their chances tonight.\n"We're going in expecting to win," freshman defender Kara Kornfeld said. "Everyone's really energized. We are all excited to continue our success."\nAfter the team's disappointing setback against the Nittany Lions, IU responded with a week of strong effort in practice.\n"We had a really hard week of practice," Kornfeld said. "After our loss against Penn State, we decided we were going to learn from it. We are normally off on Monday, but we worked really hard (this) Monday and had a good practice on Tuesday."\nCoach Joe Kelley agrees the lopsided loss to Penn State has not hurt his team's morale.\n"We're still very confident and just looking forward to getting at Minnesota. It was a great week of practice; the team worked hard," Kelley said.\nMinnesota will provide one unique challenge the Hoosiers haven't seen yet this season - inclement weather. Forecasts are predicting temperatures could dip into the thirties in the Twin Cities tonight.\n"They (Minnesota) have a home field that is very much to their advantage, in terms of environment," Kelley said. "It's probably going to be like 35 degrees and we just have to be able to handle it"