The women’s soccer team fell short to Texas A&M-Commerce on Oct. 2, resulting in the team’s first conference game loss as well as ending a six-game win streak. The Lady Lions scored early in the first half to make the score 0-1, and no further goals were scored for the rest of the game.

“We were so excited and ready to play, then we started slowing down,” Nicole Coetzer, senior forward, said. “Overall, it was just frustrating.”

This week, Texas A&M-Commerce was nationally ranked No. 11 for Division II women’s soccer, something the head coach, Damian Clarke, said he did not think was an intimidating factor.

“I don’t even know if our kids knew that they are eleventh. I think we tried our best not to talk about that because we’re nationally ranked too [No. 24]. I think we all know each other well enough in the conference to know that on any given day, any team can beat any team, so it wasn’t about the ranking,” Clarke said.

The players had just come off of a win on Sept. 30 against Texas Woman’s University, which brought the team record to 3-0-0 in LSC play, and Coetzer said that win boosted team moral going into Sunday afternoon’s game.

“We were actually really confident because of how we played on Friday,” Coetzer said. “But we recently just switched our formation, and I guess Commerce paid attention to that. We had constant pressure from them.”

Clarke said that this loss is not something that will negatively affect the team, but rather be a learning experience.

“I think any time you lose you have to check your mentality. We have to ask ourselves, ‘did we lose because of mentality?’ or ‘did we lose because they just beat us on the day?’ I think we need to improve and get better from the loss,” Clarke said.

Sarah Stewart, sophomore defender, said that she is excited for another chance to take on the Lady Lions.

“I know we could’ve beat them, they just got lucky on that one goal,” Stewart said. “Next time we play them, we definitely need to defend better off of in the air balls because they kick it a lot, and we play better passing on the ground.”

However, Clarke is not focused on the second match up against Texas A&M-Commerce right now.

“It’s more about the next game. I try not to look too far ahead and worry about Commerce again until we get there. We’ve got to beat West Texas and beat Eastern New Mexico before we stress about Commerce again,” Clarke said.