Nov. 2, 2007
The 10th-ranked Notre Dame women’s soccer team – riding the nation’s longest active win streak (10 games) – will begin its annual postseason quest on Sunday at Alumni Field, as the Irish play host to Rutgers in a BIG EAST quarterfinal at 1:00 p.m. The game will be a quick rematch of last Sunday’s game, when visiting Notre Dame posted a 3-1 win over the Scarlet Knights. A video broadcast of the game will be streamed live on und.com (as a reminder, all video and audio content at und.com is free of charge).
(Note: see the und.com video view links for video interviews conducted earlier this week with Notre Dame head coach Randy Waldrum and junior forward Kerri Hanks.)
Rutgers (9-8-3) finished fifth in the BIG EAST National Division (4-5-2) before advancing from a first-round game at St. John’s on Thursday night. That game was scoreless after 110 minutes of play, with Rutgers then winning the penalty-kick shootout (4-2) thanks to a pair of early saves from veteran goalkeeper Erin Guthrie.
Notre Dame (13-4-1, 11-0-0 BIG EAST) never has lost in the BIG EAST quarterfinal round (8-0-0) and owns a 27-2-0 overall record in BIG EAST Tournament play. The Irish are in quest of their 10th BIG EAST Tournament title in 13 years of league membership, with seven straight titles from 1995-2001 followed by winning efforts in 2005 and ’06.
The Irish historically have dominated their postseason games at Alumni Field, with a 44-3-0 (.936) all-time record in home games during the BIG EAST (12-0-0) and NCAA (32-3-0) tournaments. Notre Dame swept all 14 of its postseason games at Alumni Field during the 2004-06 seasons.
Notre Dame also owns a 13-year home unbeaten streak versus BIG EAST teams (77-0-1) and is unbeaten in 35 straight overall games versus BIG EAST opponents (34-0-1; since mid-2005), the seventh-longest conference unbeaten streak in the 26-year history of Division I women’s soccer history (two shy of the ND record).
Rutgers is the only visiting BIG EAST team in the past 13 seasons to depart Alumni Field without a loss, as the Irish and Scarlet Knights played to a scoreless tie during Notre Dame’s 2004 NCAA championship campaign. Notre Dame owns a 14-1-2 edge (6-0-1 at Alumni Field) in the history of the series with Rutgers, with a 50-8 scoring margin.
In Thursday’s earlier first-round game, Villanova defeated visiting South Florida (2-0) and next will play at West Virginia on Sunday in the quarterfinals. The other quarterfinal matchups feature Georgetown at Connecticut and Marquette at Louisville. The winner of the GU-UConn game will face the ND-RU winner in the semifinal round, on Nov. 9 at West Virginia’s Dick Dlesk Stadium (to be telecast live on CSTV; time TBA).
Sunday’s ND-RU game will provide a rarity in the 15-year history of the BIG EAST women’s soccer championship, as the teams that met in the previous season’s BIG EAST title game (a 4-2 Irish win) will square off in the quarterfinal round. In fact, no previous finalists have met in the following year’s BIG EAST semifinals while Notre Dame and UConn are the only teams to rematch in back-to-back BIG EAST championship games (the Irish beat the Huskies in the final game from 1995-2000 and again in both ’05 and ’06).
The upcoming game with Rutgers also will mark the third time that Notre Dame has opened its postseason versus the same team it faced in the regular-season finale. Notre Dame’s 1996 NCAA runner-up team ended that regular season with a 10-1 win over Villanova and then beat the Wildcats the following week in the BIG EAST semifinals (7-0, at Alumni Field). The 2005 Irish squad similarly ended its regular season by beating Georgetown 6-1, followed a week later by a 6-0 win over the Hoyas in the quarterfinal round. Both of the games versus VU and GU were played at Alumni Field (Note that the BIG EAST quarterfinals were introduced in 1998.)
Notre Dame junior forward Kerri Hanks has totaled 12 points (four goals, four assists) in four career games versus Rutgers. She has opened the scoring in two of those games while registering an overtime game-winning goal (1-0 in 2005, at RU) and assisting on two other GWGs versus the Scarlet Knights. Hanks assisted on goals by Brittany Bock and Amanda Cinalli in the 2006 midseason meeting versus Rutgers (2-0) before scoring the first two goals in the 2006 BIG EAST title game (RU scored a pair of late goals for the 4-2 final). Last week’s game saw Hanks score to tie the game before assisting on goals by Susan Pinnick and Becca Mendoza, for the 3-1 win over the Scarlet Knights.