After 100 minutes of scrappy play, junior defender Catharina Von Drigalski scored for the first time in her career to seal the Stony Brook women’s soccer team’s 2-1 overtime triumph over the St. Joseph’s Hawks on Sunday, Sept. 12 at Kenneth P. LaValle Stadium.
A shallow pass from freshman forward Aneta Sovakova was all Drigalski needed. She snuck a light, bouncing shot into the right corner of the net and began celebrating before the ball even went in.
“I think we did a really good job in switching the field, getting the ball to the left side,” Drigalski said in a postgame interview with The Statesman. “Then a quick combination with Aneta on the outside, and then I just saw the open goal and scored.”
Offense was scarce throughout the game. Taking advantage of a lenient officiating crew, both teams played physically and pushed off each other to gain the upper hand.
“We don’t like physical games,” head coach Tobias Bischof said. “We like to play a proper game, pass the ball and move and don’t have it that physical. However, with conference play coming up, this is one of those things, what is a little bit more naturally happening during conference games.”
That led to gridlock in a scoreless first half, but senior forward Alicia D’Aoust broke the game open in the 77th minute with her first career goal.
Isolated among three defenders, D’Aoust recovered a free kick by creating space with a body check and launched a powerful shot into the top right corner of the net. St. Joseph’s goalkeeper Katie Cappelletti could not make contact even with an impressive vertical jump.
“I got teary-eyed,” D’Aoust said. “It’s been just such a long time since I was able to really make an impact in the field like that. Just transferring from Rutgers, I really had to earn my way back up to get minutes on the field… and my teammates have been so supportive. And yeah, it was a great feeling.”
With two goals, the Seawolves equaled their total from their previous six games. It was the first time this season they scored multiple goals in a single game.
However, it still felt insufficient.
Stony Brook failed to capitalize on an abundance of corner kicks, allowing St. Joseph’s to block almost every shot the Seawolves took from close range. Their longest offensive rally came in the 65th minute, but graduate midfielder Chelsie DePonte’s shot was deflected off Cappelletti’s fingertips.
“I thought we thought we had a couple of other looks where we should have done better,” Bischof said. “We had a couple almost free headers where we should have scored. I thought, a couple times we were in the shooting range, and we decided to play an extra pass where we probably should have taken shots. Two goals is hopefully enough to win a game but today was a day where I wouldn’t like to have at least one more.”
Junior goalkeeper Emerson Richmond Burke turned in another excellent performance. Her five saves included a leaping diagonal catch in the 30th minute to keep the game scoreless.
Stony Brook will complete its three-game homestand with games against Cornell and Albany this Friday and Sunday.
