Men's Soccer Team Evens Up Record With Win Against Bridgewater State

With most PSU students still settling into their daily schedule, the Men's Soccer team has already played four games- most recently defeating Bridgewater State with a 2-1 victory with goals from Petro Masumbuko and Matt Anderson.

With the victory the team improved to an even .500 record at 2-2.

Head Coach Rob Wright feels very enthusiastic about this year's squad.

"Every game has been close but in the back of our minds we can't help but feel we should be 4 and 0," Wright said.

Both defeats were at the hands of late goals; one of which was in double overtime.

"The biggest problem we do have right now is the injuries, we're facing maybe only having 16 players for the game on Tuesday out of a squad of 23," the coach said. Wright explained how the team was hoping to have somewhere between 26 to 28 players this season but lost contributors to concussions and hamstring injuries. "All of a sudden we find ourselves with a third of the guys injured," he said.

But despite a roster that was visibly smaller than Bridgewater's in the box score, the team edged out a victory - a testament to the quality of the players starting for PSU.

"We've got a good team." Wright said, highlighting a few players with a tremendous

upside. "Parker Spear is [an] outstanding player, but always struggled with different injuries. Bjorn Ohlsson should be the best goalkeeper in the conference but struggled for a long time after the serious knee injury he had as a freshman."

"We've got a great senior class that for various reasons has never been fit and firing together."

The team is composed of a handful of international players along with a large core of New Hampshire natives, and even larger expectations.

"We would never dream of going into a season not believing we couldn't win the LEC [Little East Conference]," he said.

The first big test is this Saturday (9/15) against conference opponent UMass Dartmouth right here in our backyard at Plymouth.

"It's not like we get to play each team twice, you either get a good result or you don't," Wright said of the emphasis on Saturday's game.

With a shorter list of active players than Coach Wright would have hoped for, he's hoping for support from an extra man who doesn't show up on the roster; the Plymouth State faithful. "We certainly need the positive crowd support. It's huge."

Be sure to catch the match this Saturday at 1:00 P.M.