The Virginia field hockey team closed out its regular season Sunday with a 4-0 loss to the No. 2 Duke Blue Devils.
No. 20 Virginia finished with an 8-10 record, 0-5 in ACC play.
Duke put the Cavaliers in a hole early, notching the first goal less than five minutes into the game. After feeding the ball into space through two Virginia defenders, a Duke forward ran onto the ball, dribbled and wrapped it around a sliding Katherine Blair.
Junior back Erin Hayes nearly knotted the game up at the 24:30 mark, though, dribbling into the goalmouth before blasting a shot across the goal just wide of the far post.
Virginia was able to hold the Blue Devils scoreless for the remainder of the first half, thanks to more heroics from Blair. With 4:15 left in the half, Duke managed to dribble the ball down the baseline toward the goal, but Blair protected the inside post, and the Cavaliers managed to clear the ball.
In the final 35 minutes, however, the Cavaliers broke down.
"I wouldn't say it was poor execution," Virginia coach Jess Wilk said. "It was more [that] it wasn't consistent. I thought we marked fairly well, I thought we defended fairly well, but we had a couple slip-ups."
One minute and three seconds into the second half, Blair did a split to stop a Blue Devil shot, but Duke poked in the rebound to extend the lead to 2-0.
Then, with 26:24 remaining, a Duke shot deflected off Blair, and, while a Blue Devils forward was falling into the net, she pulled the ball in with her.
Down 3-0, the Cavaliers kept fighting, earning their first and only short corner of the game with 9:45 left. Senior forward Katie Phillips's shot was blocked, though, and senior midfielder Allie Flynn's ensuing shot was just wide of the cage.
The Blue Devils would tack on a final goal at the 8:30 mark in the second half.
It will be crucial for Virginia to learn from its mistakes made against Duke. The Cavaliers will tangle with the Blue Devils again in the first round of the ACC Field Hockey Championships Thursday.
"We need to work on being smarter with our attacking opportunities and playing tougher defense," Phillips said.
One aspect the Cavaliers improved on was preventing and defending short corners. Virginia allowed only two short corners in the first 48 minutes of the game before conceding three more down the stretch.
"I was very pleased with [short corner prevention]," Wilk said. "That's something we've been working on for the past three weeks or so, and I thought we did a much better job defending and protecting the circle."
As good as they were at stopping the short corner, the Cavaliers struggled to put enough pressure on the Duke defense to generate any offense of its own.
"We talked about really attacking with numbers, and when we were possessing the ball, we had to have all ten field players on attack," Wilk said. "I think there were times when we committed to that and times where we played too defensively."
Virginia will practice tomorrow before leaving for College Park Wednesday morning.
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