For teams with national title aspirations like the Wildcats, the whole year revolves around peaking for the postseason.
By the end of this week, Northwestern will complete its regular season and begin its postseason push, needing six more wins for a fifth straight national championship. But the Cats are too disciplined to let themselves start thinking that way.
“That’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid,” coach Kelly Amonte Hiller said. “Once you start looking ahead, you forget about the task at hand and you misstep.”
The task at hand for NU is Wednesday’s home game against No. 14 Ohio State. It is the Cats’ last conference game before the ALC tournament next weekend.
Sunday’s hard-fought 11-10 road victory over then-No. 10 Virginia was NU’s closest game this season. Amonte Hiller’s squad will try to draw from that experience going into the closing stretch.
“It was a good lesson,” said senior midfielder Meredith Frank, who scored once and came up with two draw controls against the Cavaliers. “Virginia is an extraordinary team, so I don’t think that it was a ‘bad win.’ You keep it in the back of the memory and you move forward.”
The Cats have bounced back well this season after playing in close games.
The two toughest tests prior to last weekend were against North Carolina and Duke, games in which NU held slim one-goal leads at halftime before breaking it open in the second half.
In both instances, the victory built momentum going into the next contest – the Cats responded by beating their next two opponents by a combined 28 goals, including a decisive 15-4 road win over then-No. 8 Georgetown.
The strong performance from those follow-up games is exactly what NU wants to repeat against Ohio State.
“Obviously the main goal is to get to the national championship, but you can’t get there unless you keep improving game after game,” senior attacker Casey Donohoe said. “We just want to take it up another level.”
In a lot of ways, having two more regular season games is a positive.
Virginia, Ohio State and Pennsylvania, the Cats’ final three opponents, are all ranked in the top 20. The high quality of competition will prepare the players for what they will see later on. NU could potentially face these teams again in the conference tournament or the playoffs.
“Getting time in these pressure games is huge and will give them the confidence down the stretch,” Amonte Hiller said.
The coaching staff also has the opportunity to put in more sets and try different combinations of players, although the short time between games this week has limited that to some extent.
“We’re always trying to put in new stuff at the end of the season,” Amonte Hiller said. “We try to get as many different looks as we can, and the more time we have to prepare, the more we can do that.”
The Buckeyes will present the Cats defense with a tough challenge. Ohio State’s offense is sixth in the country in goals per game. Trying to shut down junior attacker Kelly Haggerty, second behind NU’s Hannah Nielsen in points, will be a test as well, especially after Virginia’s leading scorer Blair Weymouth found the back of the net four times Sunday.
The Cats’ offense also benefits from having two more games to work out the kinks.
The unit struggled at times against the Cavaliers, recording season lows in shots and goals.
NU still misses the production of senior attacker and leading scorer Hilary Bowen, who is sidelined indefinitely with a torn ACL in her left knee. But having extra time to mesh will help.
“It’s still an adjustment period,” Donohoe said. “We lost one of our best players from the past three years, so obviously there’s going to be some holes. Every game we can have to get a little bit more acquainted with each other is good.”
