With under seven minutes left in a scoreless game against Northeastern, junior Georgia Allen was open from the top of the box. She took the pass and struck it to an unreachable part of the net, the top right corner. Her goal, in only her second game of the season after playing in the U-20 World Cup, lifted Syracuse above .500.

Things were different then. The 3-2 Orange felt like it could go on a run, Allen said, and surpass the seven wins from the year before. For a young team with 16 underclassmen, that victory could’ve been the one to push SU into contention in the ACC.

But it didn’t. And nobody expected what would follow.

Since its 1-0 victory against Northeastern on Sept. 2, SU has lost 12-straight games. In that span, it’s conceded 43 goals, including an average of five goals a game in its last five contests. Syracuse (3-14, 0-9 Atlantic Coast) hasn’t won a game in nearly two months. With its final game on Thursday against Clemson and its playoff hopes diminished since the start of the month, Syracuse can’t change the season’s outcome. Instead, it can just analyze what went wrong.

“We’ve been decimated since the start of the season onwards,” SU head coach Phil Wheddon said. “… We’re just in an unfortunate situation.”

Coming into the season, Syracuse graduated its “deepest” recruiting class, one that featured All-ACC honoree Courtney Brosnan and two of its top defenders in Alana O’Neill and Jessica Vigna. The group never qualified for the ACC tournament. Its 2018 squad, highlighted by last season’s leading scorer, Sydney Brackett, and young defenders like Clarke Brown, wanted to change that.

And for its first five games, it looked possible. SU rebounded from its opening loss to La Salle with back-to-back wins against Connecticut and St. John’s, with sophomore Kate Hostage scoring in both. Even when the Orange got blown out 4-0 by then-winless Harvard, Allen followed up the shaky performance with her 83rd-minute game-winner.

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The Orange’s first sign of instability started in goal. Graduate-transfer Jordan Harris played all 90 minutes in SU’s first three games but began to split time with sophomore Lysianne Proulx after its loss to the Crimson.

Early in its losing streak, Syracuse’s losses weren’t blowouts. With a lead in the final 20 minutes against Kent State at home on Sept. 13, the Orange conceded, sending the game to overtime. Eventually, SU’s backline fell apart and gave the game away in the 103rd minute.

Ten days later, SU kept a one-loss Louisville scoreless for 89 minutes until the Cardinals took the lead with 9 seconds left in regulation.

“We fall asleep for (those) moments,” Wheddon said on Oct. 7.

But as the season carried into conference play, the Orange got further away from a victory. Proulx found her stride in goal, but after a 6-3 loss to North Carolina State, she went down with a hip injury and was eventually ruled out for the season.

With solely Harris playing in goal, SU’s close losses primarily became blowouts. In a three-game stretch between Oct. 4 and 13, the Orange were outscored 18-5.

“All you can do is just try and keep taking small positives out of these games,” Allen said. “You can choose to sit here and talk about how many goals you conceded or you can choose to make a difference.”

The Orange opened the season in a 4-3-3, but quickly shifted to a 4-5-1 when they started to concede goals. With the ACC tournament no longer attainable, Syracuse has tried a new approach in its last two games. Wheddon employed a formation in which all 11 players stayed on defense to avoid the opposing team running up the score. The switch tries to stop top-ACC offenses but makes it almost impossible to play offense. Against Virginia on Thursday, SU conceded four goals but couldn’t record a shot.

With the Orange’s streak reaching double-digits, Allen said her sights are set on next season. Wheddon said he’s going to try “my best until my very last day here.”

Wheddon called SU’s final game against Clemson “massively important.” Syracuse’s goal has always been to get points in the ACC, he said. Those don’t matter anymore, though. The Orange just need a good final performance at SU Soccer Stadium.

“We don’t take this for granted,” Allen said. “We won’t be put out by this season next year. We’ll make changes.”

Published on October 23, 2018 at 11:15 pm

Contact KJ: kjedelma@syr.edu | @KJEdelman