The NMU Men’s Soccer team swepted the weekend matches, including an overtime homecoming victory over the Purdue-Northwest University (PNWU) Pride.
Junior midfielder Luca Lippert had an historic outing against PNWU, as he recorded the first hat trick in program history, including the game-winning goal in overtime. The Wildcats won that match 3-2, extending its record to 2-3 on the season. Two days later, NMU faced the Upper Iowa University (UIU) Peacocks, and came out victorious 2-0 to go undefeated on the weekend. Its record was now back to .500, and sits at 3-3 heading into a Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference doubleheader this weekend against the Ashland University (AU) Eagles and the Davenport University (DU) Panthers.
Head coach David Poggi was happy with the weekend, as it was an exciting time for his program.
“[I’m feeling] happy, this was the first homecoming that my program has ever experienced, and it was a great homecoming weekend for a lot of reasons,” Poggi said. “It doesn’t hurt when you get two results that were both exciting games and more guys got playing time, so it was good.”
The weekend also gave the team two more games worth of experience, and Poggi is trying to teach his young team the learning curve.
“I think that we learned some things about what we can do well, but we also learned a lot of things about what we can do better,” Poggi said. “That’s the challenge in a very short week, to get ready for Ashland and for Davenport.”
The Wildcats travel to Ashland, Ohio on Friday, Sept. 27, for the first game of the doubleheader against AU. The Eagles are 0-5, but they have been competitive in their matches, only losing one by more than a goal. Poggi dismissed the record because he knows what challenges are brought to the field.
“Ollie (Slawson) does a great job with that team, they’re always in every match, last year they were the last team to make the GLIAC tournament and wound up going to the national tournament,” Poggi said. “So they’re a team that on any given day, is capable of playing very well. We’ll have to play our best to be in it.”
The Wildcats then have a short turnaround, and go from playing AU on Friday night, to playing DU on Sunday afternoon. The Panthers are 2-3 on the season thus far, but are 2-0 in conference play.
“We have a short ride to Davenport to play a team that’s undefeated [in the conference], a year ago they were picked to win the GLIAC, but they didn’t make the conference tournament,” Poggi said. “They had some setbacks with players who were injured, and were unfortunate in a couple of matches, but Chris is a great recruiter, he’s got a history and network of recruiting. He’s very impressive, he has a team that he’s put together that is really starting to fire on all cylinders.”
The Wildcats play on the road at Ferguson Field at 7 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 27 against the AU Eagles.
