The 11th-annual Big Ten/ACC Challenge is in the books, and No. 12 Iowa returns home with a 1-1 record from the weekend.
The Hawkeyes, along with No. 10 Michigan, made the trip to Winston-Salem, N.C. to face off with No. 13 Wake Forest and No. 2 North Carolina on the Demon Deacons’ campus.
Iowa played Wake Forest on Aug. 25 and squeaked out a 3-2 victory in overtime to start the fall campaign. The Hawkeyes trailed 2-0 at halftime, then goals from Kelsey Mitchell and Corinne Allen tied the game. Jessica Barnett put away the winning goal in overtime to cap the comeback.
“We weren’t matching up well at the beginning of the game,” head coach Tracey Griesbaum said in a release on Aug. 25. “We regrouped and made some major changes in the second half. It was a great sign of a mature team, because they could have very easily quit. It showed a lot about their character that they could come back from 2-0 and take it a play at a time.”
Sunday’s matchup against the No. 2 Tar Heels didn’t go so well for the Black and Gold, however.
Carolina put its first two goals away in the first 10 minutes of the match. The Tar Heels’ offense didn’t slow down, and the Hawkeyes entered halftime trailing 4-0.
North Carolina scored only once in the second half, finishing with a 5-0 win and pushing Iowa’s record to 1-1 on the season. The Tar Heels finished the weekend 2-0, outscoring their opponents 10-1 in the process and outshooting Iowa 23-5 in Sunday’s game.
“We started off really sluggishly and never really gained control of the game,” Griesbaum said in a release following the loss. “North Carolina played a very good game, especially in transition. We played very tentatively, and some of our key players did not play well today. I felt like we were playing at a deficit from the start of the game.”
However, the Hawkeyes fared better than their conference foe — Michigan went 0-2 during the weekend. The Tar Heels thumped the Wolverines, 5-1, on Saturday, and Michigan lost a heartbreaker to Wake Forest on Sunday, 2-1.
The Hawkeye’s overall record in the Big Ten/ACC Challenge is now 5-17.
– by Cody Goodwin
