The Northwestern field hockey team has come out on the short end of some intense matches this year. And a team meeting before they squared off against Stanford on Sunday basically summed up their feelings.

“Coach (Marisa) Didio just came out and said how we’re like a gun that’s ready to unload,” junior Candice Cooper said.

They did just that. After being shut out in their previous three games, the Cats flipped the script and got back on the winning track by blanking the Cardinal, 2-0.

Freshman Meghan Small struck first when she took a pass from sophomore Ellen Schlafly and sent the ball past Cardinal goalkeeper Emily Zander.

Then Cooper added a little breathing room with five minutes left in the game, scoring her team-leading fourth goal of the season to make it 2-0.

“This was a great win for us because we’re going beyond just holding our own,” senior Suzi Sutton said. “We’ve been dominating matches, and it’s nice to finish opportunities that we get.”

Cooper and senior Diane Provencher kept constant pressure on the Stanford defense with nine shot attempts between them.

It was a complete win, as the defense chipped in with its typically stingy style of play. Freshman goalkeeper Sheri-Anne Nyberg was a brick wall disguised in pads as she stopped all seven of Stanford’s shots. Nyberg played through nagging knee pain to earn her first career shutout.

The win came on the heels of Friday’s hotly contested match against Big Ten rival, Michigan State. The Cats fell to the Spartans, 3-0, but reading between the lines of the box score shows a much closer game than the final score indicates.

The Cats, who have played more defensively during the season, came out firing against the Spartans. NU had 14 shots on goal to Michigan State’s six.

“It’s frustrating to get as many shots on goal as we did and not come away with one,” Cooper said. “Everything is really clicking and working perfectly, but we just need to finish.”

Spartans goalkeeper Christina Kirkaldy, who was the Big Ten leader in saves going into the match, played a major role in keeping the Cats off the scoreboard. Kirkaldy notched 14 saves on her way to her third shut out of the season.

So with the Cats are still hunting for their first conference victory, the gun will load up again and hopefully have a hair trigger for Friday’s trip to face nationally ranked Penn State on Sunday.