Taming the Wildcats

The Blue Devils have opened the season strong, including a 25-4 win against Elon, but they will need to bring their top effort against the Wildcats.
The Blue Devils have opened the season strong, including a 25-4 win against Elon, but they will need to bring their top effort against the Wildcats.

After handily winning its first three contests of the season, No. 5 Duke will face its toughest challenge yet when its first ranked opponent—No. 4 Northwestern—visits Durham Saturday for a 12 p.m. matchup.

“We’ve played them for a long time,” Duke head coach Kerstin Kimel said. “They’re going to have a lot of tricks up their sleeve.”

The Wildcats (1-0) have only played one game so far this season, and, unlike the Blue Devils’ contests, it was nowhere near one-sided. Duke has defeated all of its opponents by at least three goals—including a 25-4 romp of Elon to open the season, tying the school record for most points scored in a game. Northwestern, however, nearly fell to No. 9 Virginia in a 13-12 win that featured four lead changes and eight Wildcat goal scorers.

“You obviously have to take what they did against Virginia and prepare,” Kimel said. “But what we need to focus on is their tendencies and then be ready to make changes as the game goes on with whatever they’re doing on offense.”

Midfielder Alyssa Leonard, who notched two goals against the Cavaliers, is Northwestern’s leading returning scorer after recording 37 tallies last season. The senior set school records for draw controls in a single season with 125 during her junior year. Leonard also led the Wildcats in assists in 2013.

Northwestern only returns one true defender from last season in senior Kerri Harrington. As a faceguarding specialist, Harrington was the only non-senior besides Leonard and goalkeeper Bridget Bianco to start 19 games or more. She will be joined on the defense by graduate student Kate Ivory, who earned an extra year of eligibility after a knee injury cut her junior season short at Cornell. Ivory was named the 2013 Ivy League Defender of the Year and tied the Big Red’s school record with 33 caused turnovers.

“Even though Northwestern graduated a lot [defensively], they tend to rebuild year after year,” Kimel said. “In terms of Leonard, she’s hard to combat. She’s known for the draw, and obviously we’re going to have a plan for her.”

Countering Harrington, Ivory and Bianco will be Duke’s offense, led by junior Kerrin Maurer. Playing attack, she led the Blue Devils in scoring with 70 points on 35 goals and 35 assists last season, and has done the same so far in 2014 with 13 goals and five assists. She is joined up front by sophomore Kelci Smesko, who is second in points with eight off five goals and three assists.

To make a dent against the Blue Devils, the Wildcats will first have to get through 2013 second-team All-American goalkeeper Kelsey Duryea. The sophomore is third in the ACC with a .536 save percentage and is second with an average of 7.5 saves per game.

“At least in the last couple of seasons, [Northwestern] has been more veteran, and we’ve been a lot younger, which has shown in our performances,” Kimel said. “I don’t think we’ve necessarily been the most composed team when we’ve played them, but our group is more experienced this year.”

The last time Duke faced Northwestern was during its third-to-last contest of the 2013 season, when they fell to the Wildcats 12-4. It was the Blue Devils’ lowest scoring output of the season, with Northwestern recording more shots and draw controls, and 14 fewer fouls, than Duke. The Wildcats hold a 10-game winning streak over the Blue Devils, dating back to 2006.

But Kimel thinks that this year her squad could break the pattern.

“What’s neat is that we have a lot of scoring threat, and we try to cultivate a lot of different types of players so we’re not just one- or two-dimensional,” Kimel said. “If you shut down one person, you’re going to have to worry about seven or eight others, and that’s the way we’d ideally like to be. We want to be unpredictable.”

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