The Marquette men’s soccer team finished third in the Marquette Invitational defeating Florida Gulf-Coast 1-0 on Friday before falling 2-0 to Santa Clara.

The scoring came early for Marquette against FGCU, as junior midfielder Callum Mallace collected his first goal of the season off of a corner kick from junior midfielder Amilcar Hererra in the second minute of play.

The Golden Eagles took over play from there, as most of the game’s action took place on FGCU’s end of the field. But in the last 10 minutes, FGCU came on strong and the majority of the rest of the game was spent in Marquette’s zone.

“In the last 15 minutes we probably played our worst soccer.”  said “we had prepared for everything except for playing out a lead.” said coach Louis Bennett.

It was the first time the Golden Eagles had to defend a lead at the end of this season. During the last 10-minute stretch, Bennett yelled at his players to “settle down,” as they continually booted the ball into the air as soon as they gained contact with it.

“Even though they were coming at us pretty hard, they didn’t have one good, clean chance,” Bennett said. “The shots were from a distance, (and) we blocked people out.”

Sunday’s match against Santa Clara brought new challenges. The first half was spent mostly in Marquette’s end, with the Golden Eagles stuck defending. Santa Clara had nine shots to Marquette’s four in the first half.

One of those shots came off of a direct kick in which sophomore goalkeeper David Check was forced to come out of the goalkeeper’s box and contest the ball. He tipped it toward a Santa Clara player who volleyed it into the net.

“We came out really slow, and I don’t think we were prepared,” said freshman defenseman Eric Pothast. “I think we expected them to basically hand us the game, and we didn’t take care of our end of the business. When you come out flat like that, it’s hard to pick it up.”

But in the second half, Marquette picked it up. The team outshot Santa Clara 12-4 and had a 9-1 advantage in corner kicks in the second half but was unable to put away any of its chances.

Santa Clara, however, took advantage of the penalty kick it was awarded in the 68th minute. The Bronco player knocked the ball into the lower left corner of the goal past a diving Check.

Hererra said the problem in Sunday’s game was that too many players were trying to do their own thing, rather than playing the team’s gameplan.

“We weren’t organized enough,” Hererra said. “We tried to do too much individual stuff, and obviously it didn’t work.”

Bennett said the change from Friday’s to Sunday’s game was the team’s ability to stick to the gameplan.

“The big difference between (Sunday) and Friday was that we had a very strict gameplan on Friday that we adhered to, but (Sunday) we struggled to get that done,” Bennett said.