Ugly scrap mars match as Miami slug past Maryland women in College Park
By Charles Boehm
The Maryland women’s soccer team wore pink socks to mark Breast Cancer Awareness Month in their home match against the University of Miami in College Park, Md. on Thursday night, but the night soon turned out to be a dark and ugly one.
Eager for a positive result in one of their final Atlantic Coast Conference games of the season, the Terrapins and Hurricanes battled to a scoreless draw over 90 minutes of regulation play marked by hard challenges and physical play.
With two minutes left before the game proceeded into overtime, the simmering enmity boiled over after Miami’s Maddie Simms committed the latest in a string of hard tackles on Terps leading scorer Hayley Brock.
That drew an angry reaction from Brock and sparked a wider melee between the teams which was called a “skirmish” by the Terps’ official match report and a “brawl” and “fight” by the Diamondback, UMd’s campus newspaper. The publication also reported that athletic director Kevin Anderson and university president Wallace Loh were both in attendance at the match.
Referee Nate Penn’s handling of the rough-and-tumble game to that point has come under question and after the fight, the man in the middle was forced to dish out three red cards (to Simms, Brock and Miami forward Kate Howarth) in addition to the three yellows (one for Maryland, two for Miami) he’d already shown.
“This game certainly was the most intense game that we’ve played this year,” Maryland head coach Jonathan Morgan told the Diamondback afterwards. “I think that the nature of Miami’s style of play in general … it added a lot of emotion. It was really a circus, to be honest. The lack of management of the game itself just didn’t control things.”
Most frustratingly for Morgan and his team, they were unable to earn the last laugh. Some seven minutes into overtime the Hurricanes’ Jordan Roseboro slotted home a loose ball in the box after Maryland goalkeeper Terps goalkeeper Rachelle Beanlands crashed into veteran teammate Domenica Hodak.
“We had an opportunity tonight to grow in adverse conditions when things got hot and heavy, and instead we didn’t handle the situation the right way,” Morgan added. “We got caught up into the emotions. We got caught up into some things that didn’t matter, and in turn we let it affect our play and our composure. That was our own doing tonight.”
The bad vibes continued at Ludwig in Maryland’s final regular-season home game on Sunday afternoon, as No. 1-ranked Florida State slipped past the Terps 1-0 on an 86th-minute goal from Tiffany McCarty.
Morgan’s squad has rolled up an 11-5-2 overall record (6-3-1 in ACC play) and while these two season-ending losses will likely see them drop out of the top 10 places of the NSCAA Division I rankings, they could still earn a top-four seed in ACC tournament play and thus host a first-round match in College Park.
[ +Read the Diamondback’s full coverage of Thursday night’s match here ]
[ +Check out Diamondback photographer Charlie DeBoyace’s gallery of images from the match here ]
