Lycoming set for its first appearance in playoffs
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With a school-record 12 wins, the Lycoming College women's soccer team will step into the postseason for the first time in the program's 29 years when it heads to No. 2 Stevens Institute of Technology as the No. 3-seed in the MAC Freedom Championship semifinal on Thursday.
The Warriors (12-5-2 overall, 5-3 MAC Freedom), ranked eighth in the latest United Soccer Coaches' Region IV poll, are facing a Stevens' team that is ranked seventh, while sixth-ranked and No. 4-seed DeSales takes on the nation's top-ranked team, Misericordia, in the other semifinal.
The Warriors have come tantalizingly close to reaching the postseason many times in the program's 29-year history, but it wasn't until a 1-0 win over DeSales on Oct. 22 that the team finally clinched a spot in the conference tournament. The 1997 and 1998 teams finished third in the Freedom League under coach Jack Shafer in the days when only two teams from the Freedom and the Commonwealth League's entered a combined MAC Championship. The 2001 and 2004 teams finished fifth in the Freedom Conference, one slot out of the conference tournament and the 2008 team actually finished tied for fourth in the MAC Commonwealth under coach Joe Balduino, but Arcadia earned the tiebreaker thanks to a win over third-seeded Elizabethtown. The 2021 team won three conference games, the most in 16 years, but came up a point short of reaching the tournament, behind FDU-Florham and Wilkes.
At the heart of the team's renaissance has been the seven-member senior class, that includes a pair of midfielders that have developed into two of the most talented players in program history in Bella Green, a South Williamsport graduate, who went to Lycoming in August after signing an NLI at a Division II school, and Bridget Maaloum, and a quartet of defenders that have grown into key cogs in the team's game plan in center back Emily Mort, Kylie Magaro, Evelyn Cronise and Madison Wineburg. Rorie Bass Foresman has helped solidify a young group of forwards.