Hamline’s women’s soccer team’s fortunes are starting to look up. After a 1-5-0 start to the year, the team (2-5-1, 0-1-1 MIAC) beat Northwestern (MN) 3-0, and tied Macalester 1-1 in double overtime last Saturday. This year’s team is led by senior captains Aubrey Stenson and Keanna Mienert, and head coach Ted Zingman is in his ninth year here at Hamline.

Much like the men’s team, the women’s team is working through a transition period. They lost seven seniors to graduation last year, including their starting goalie, two of their top goal-scorers and one of their backup goalies. With those losses comes opportunity for younger replacements though, and Zingman thinks he has a few good ones.

“Two first-year players that have stepped up and played a lot of minutes for us are Arendje Louter and Jensen Sevening,” said Zingman. “They’ve both been playing attacking roles for us and have been doing great.”

Zingman is preaching the idea of not thinking of the team as having stars.

“We have some really good returning players,” Zingman said. “We’re expecting a lot out of our center backs Grace Nichols and Mackenzie Zink, Mallory Wirth as one of our center midfielders, and Malya Hirshkowitz who can help our team out in a number of ways and we can move her around the field. We obviously expect a lot out of our senior captains Aubrey Stenson and Keanna Mienert and they have been living up to expectations thus far. So yeah, we got some great returning players but we don’t think of it as who are our stars and who aren’t.”

The team had a much better start to their season last year as they went 4-0-1 before MIAC play started. This year’s start has been much tougher, but Zingman isn’t too worried.

“I think we’ve been playing well. Obviously if you look at our record we haven’t quite seen the results yet but I’ve been really happy with the style of soccer and the competitiveness and I think if we clean up some mistakes we’re really gonna start to see better results,” Zingman said.

The team’s offense had struggled a fair amount in the first four games of the year with only two goals scored in those four games, but the offense has slowly been getting on track and have scored seven goals in the next four games.

“Lately as we’ve gotten into conference play our offense has really stepped up,” said Zingman. “We’re very strong in the midfield and on defense but have really started to create a higher number of scoring opportunities and we have to keep pushing to finish a higher percentage of those chances.”

The mental attitude of coach and players seems to be focused on the practice or game that’s taking place that day over looking forward to any particular game left on the schedule.

“I think we’re improving every day, and we’re taking it one practice and game at a time,” said senior captain Aubrey Stenson. “We’re focusing on playing our game, improving as a team day by day.”

Stenson does, however, have a few games she is ready for.

“Augsburg is one; we beat them my sophomore year but since then we haven’t so that’s a pretty big game. And since we haven’t beaten Macalester in program history, that’s always a big game,” she said.

As part of its non-conference play, the team took a trip out to Washington to play Pacific Lutheran University and the University of Puget Sound, losing 0-4 and 0-1. Sophomore midfielder Teylen Sheesley enjoyed the trip out west, even with the two losses.

“My favorite game so far this year was probably our game against the University of Puget Sound. It was a challenging game and we ended up losing, but I thought we played really well and it was just unfortunate not to get the result we wanted,” Sheesley said.

Coach Zingman and his team really start to get into the swing of conference play over the next few weeks. Their goals?

“Our goals are to every day just be our best. We wanna be on a continuously improving line, we wanna play better today than we did yesterday and better this week than the week before. We focus on each day and each game the same way, we just want to come out and be our best,” said Zingman.

The women’s team kicks the MIAC conference play of their season into full gear as they face St. Olaf (2-3-3 overall, 2-1 MIAC) today, Wednesday Sep. 30 at 4:00 pm in Northfield and St. Thomas (3-4-0, 1-1) back home on Saturday at 3:30 pm.