Lehigh men’s soccer continues its struggles with a loss to Robert Morris

The Lehigh men’s soccer team suffered its fourth loss in its last five matches, 2-1, to Robert Morris University at the Ulrich Sports Complex on Saturday afternoon.

Although the game against the Colonials wasn’t a Patriot League contest, the Mountain Hawks’ coach Dean Koski labeled his team’s play as a “disappointing performance.”

The Mountain Hawks had a poor start to the game and never really picked up their energy and performance.

“I think I need to bring a little more energy to the start of the game in particular, to set the tone for the rest of the game,” starting forward Mark Forrest said.

Even after an uneventful first half in which no goals were scored, Koski said their strategy leading in to the second half of the game was “to be more direct, because they were doing a good job of bottling us up, but we just didn’t do it often enough or thoughtful enough.”

After the Colonials had scored two goals in the beginning of the second half, Lehigh did its best to mount a comeback when junior Kevin Klinkenberg netted the first goal of his career as a Mountain Hawk.

But the team could not find anymore success after that point, attempting just four more shots, leaving the final score 2-1. Toward the last five minutes of the game the Colonials started to stall and the Mountain Hawks could not stop their opponents from holding the ball.

Senior goalie Jacob Gottwald had a couple of great saves throughout the game, but said he was unhappy with his performance after allowing two goals.

Even with this loss the team looks forward to improving and quickly getting in the right mindset to start winning some games. This was their fourth game of the season, and the Patriot League games start this coming week.

Gottwald said the team will have to figure out their mistakes quickly with the Patriot League portion of its schedule approaching.

The message from Koski following the loss was clear: “It’s a game we have to move on from.”