Men's soccer comes away with .500 record after weekend games

Sophomore Caleb Konstanski is tired of the way his team’s weekend performances have been starting out.

“It gets frustrating,” Konstanski said about the Hoosiers’ third straight Friday loss.

This time, it was a 2-1 decision to Brown that senior midfielder Andy Adlard said was a result of a couple of mistakes that started off the weekend.

On Sunday, No. 24 IU brought its season record back to .500 with a win against Massachusetts.  IU is now 3-3.

On Friday, Adlard was the lone scorer for IU. He finished the night with five shots, two of which were on goal.

“Friday we came out very well in the first half,” Adlard said. “We were dominating and had a few chances. The game went on, and the other team kind of stepped up a bit, and it became more of a battle. We just had two stupid mistakes that cost us. We learned how to be smart with making mistakes, and we learned from them.”

Junior forward Will Bruin, the team’s leading scorer, was held to a single shot on Friday. But it wasn’t just Bruin’s low shot total that left the Hoosiers with a losing record at the end of the night.

“Defensively we made a few errors and mental mistakes, and they capitalized on them,” Konstanski said. “Mistakes that Brown made, we weren’t able to capitalize on. They capitalized on two of our mistakes, and they got the win.”

On Sunday, the defense worked to make fewer mistakes. Bruin took four shots — one which went in for his fifth goal on the season — and Adlard scored his second goal of the weekend to give IU the victory.

Even though IU took the game, the playing conditions of Rudd Field weren’t what the team was used to.

“The grass is long,” Adlard said. “The field is very slow, so it was tough to actually play like we like to play where we pass it around and move the ball really quickly because the field was just so slow. It was getting caught up in the grass so therefore the ball was kicked long a lot and we were just playing kickball more. It just became
a battle.”

Eight IU players combined for 14 shots in what Konstanski called an away game that
wasn’t pretty.

“Today was a lot like a high school game where you just get the ball and you dump it,” Konstanski said. “The field conditions weren’t what we’re used to. The style that they play is not what we’re used to seeing.

“The ball was in the air a lot. When you feed the ball in the air like that there’s going to be a lot of fouls because a lot of people are going to be going up for 50-50 balls. It was an ugly soccer game.”

There were 29 fouls in the game, 15 of them committed by the Hoosiers. But for IU, it was another win — one that brought the team back even with their number of losses.

“It felt good to get a victory to today,” Konstanski said. “We’ve outplayed every team we played this season. We could easily be 6-0, but right now we’re 3-3 because we’ve given up some late goals. We’re going to learn from that, and we’re going to move on from this victory.”