Women's soccer: Season ends with a thud

Wright State entered its most important regular season game of the year last Friday with an opportunity to not only extend the season, but to play another match at home.

But that opportunity quickly went up in flames.

Oakland scored 39 seconds into last Friday’s match and defeated WSU 3-0 to end the Raiders’ season at 6-10-1 in snowy conditions in Michigan.\

Wright State finished at the bottom of a three-way tie in the Horizon League standings for fifth place with Cleveland State and Youngstown State. The Vikings and Penguins won the tiebreaker with the Raiders causing WSU to finish seventh in the league.

A top-six finish would have given the Raiders a berth into the Horizon League Championships. Instead, WSU missed the postseason tournament for the first time since joining the league.

“You plan and you plan and plan and say, ‘Here is what we’re going to do tactically’ and they come out and the kid (Kyla Kellermann) hit a great shot,” Wright State head coachPat Ferguson said. “Our whole game plan had to change.”

Last Friday’s loss was the first multi-goal defeat of the season for WSU who suffered nine one-goal losses in 2014.

The Raiders had to play last Friday’s match without volunteer assistant coach Travis Sobers who left the squad last week to put to rest a pair of family members who were murdered in his home nation of Trinidad and Tobago.

Sobers, a WSU alum, has been accepting donations for the funeral and burial services of his family.

“The Dayton community has done a really, really nice job of supporting him financially,” Ferguson said. “That is a big expense to fly down there and take care of the funeral costs. The soccer community and the Wright State community has rallied around him to raise money and that has helped tremendously.”

Sobers’ presence at Oakland was missed by his squad.

“I think Travis was a great player, great coach, super humble guy and the players have a ton of respect for him,” Ferguson said. “He is a really good liaison between the head coach and the players. The players feel comfortable talking to him. Not only did the players feel some type of void with him being gone, I felt a void as well.'

Ferguson will look to replace four seniors including the Horizon League’s Preseason Defender of the Year in Allie Metzler. Ferguson said that he expects to have several incoming freshmen compete to play in the starting lineup next season.