Whether Washington College is undefeated or winless, coach Jeff Shirk said his level of concern about the team is the same. So perhaps that is why he's not stressing out about the No. 16 Shoremen's 1-3 record – a start exacerbated by Saturday's 14-9 loss at Frostburg State.
"I'm always concerned with where the team is," Shirk said Monday afternoon. "I think we've addressed what our issues are, and we've determined what our issues are, and we do have a strong senior class, and they're feeling their way out. The one thing I can tell you is that besides [senior faceoff specialist] Michael Trapp and [senior midfielder] Grant Hughes, everybody else has played a supporting role over the years. And now we've got a group of guys that are now playing the lead roles, and there's a learning process.
"So whether it's [senior attackman Stephen] Luck or [junior midfielder] Sid Looney or [senior defenseman] Dan Pulzello or [sophomore goalkeeper] Jackson Szurley, all those guys are in leading roles now and they've been playing supporting roles the past couple years, and there are going to be some bumps in the road. But as I told them last night in film, I still think of them the same way I did two weeks ago. We're a very, very good team. I think we've got talent. There's just a learning curve that we're struggling through, but we're going to get there. We've just got to work through it."
Shirk said the coaches haven't found any particularly fatal flaws in the team's game plans or personnel groupings. He insisted that details have tripped up the Shoremen, who play host to No. 15 Ohio Wesleyan (4-0) on Wednesday and No. 10 Amherst (3-0) on March 17.
"It's a bunch of little things that we are not doing well right now," Shirk said. "Breaking down the film, it's just simple things like running hard to a ground ball instead of running up to a ground ball, picking it up, and stopping. Simple things like running to open space instead of rolling into pressure after we pick up that ground ball. It's crazy because we've broken the film down and pointed to some things, and we're looking at it as a staff and realizing that it's not big-picture items.
"It's the little-picture things. So getting back to the basics, that's been our focus yesterday, today, tomorrow and then after we play OWU, we've got a little bit of break before Amherst on Tuesday. So we'll have a couple more days to practice a little bit more, and focus is going to be on the little things because we're not doing the little things well right now, which is leading to the scores you see."