Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Pat Ferguson is in his 15th year as the Wright State women’s soccer coach, and while his teams have finished below .500 in the Horizon League just once since his arrival, he wasn’t satisfied with the status quo this year.
The pillar of his program has always been defense — and Maddie Jewell, a senior from Lakota West, has been a solid goal-keeper — but the Raiders scored just 16 times in 17 games in 2018 despite having conference player of the year Aaliyah Patten.
“In the past, we’ve been a team that’s really difficult to score on, but we also haven’t scored a lot of goals,” Ferguson said. “We’ve gone into this year to saying, ‘We’re not going to play not to lose. We’re going to throw numbers forward. We’re going to try to score goals.’
“We’ll probably get more goals scored on us than we traditionally have, but we’re going to run at people and see how it shakes out.”
So far, it’s shaking out quite well. The Raiders are 5-1-2 heading into their conference opener Friday at UIC — their best pre-league record since going 7-0-2 in 2006.
They’ve already matched last year’s tally of 16 goals while allowing just 11.
“They can’t key on one kid. Last year, teams keyed on Aaliyah a lot because she was so good. But we’ve got so many kids who have the capacity to score, and it’s difficult for teams to figure out which one to go after,” Ferguson said.
