Tufts Stay Perfect, Chandler Wins It With 48 Seconds Left: NESCAC Quarter-Finals Set
The NESCAC quarter-finals gave us one rout, one heart-stopper, and a semi-final lineup worth clearing next Saturday for.
Top seed Tufts are still perfect. The Jumbos thrashed Colby 4-0 at Ounjian Field, scoring in every quarter, to move to 16-0 and tie the school record for the best start to a season, set back in 2008. Senior Isabel Ginns didn’t even have to make a save for her seventh shutout of the year. Tufts outshot Colby 24-4 and held an 8-2 edge in corners. Colby finish 8-8, their most wins in a season since 2019, and that’s a decent year ended by a buzzsaw.
48 seconds of pure drama
Middlebury against Amherst was the opposite kind of game. Scoreless, tense, going nowhere, until Addie Chandler stepped up with 48 seconds left and buried a penalty stroke to win it 1-0. That’s her 12th goal of the season, team-leading, and it sends the Panthers to the conference semi-finals for the 14th straight season. Amherst can feel hard done by. They’d held the No. 2 seed scoreless for 59 minutes. Sport doesn’t care.
Williams beat Hamilton 2-0 in the third quarter-final, and Bowdoin beat Wesleyan 2-0 to complete the final four, two first-quarter goals just over a minute apart enough against a Cardinals side that outshot them 16-7. That sets up next Saturday’s semi-finals at Tufts: the hosts face Williams, and Middlebury take on Bowdoin at 1:30pm. The championship game is on Sunday 8 November, and the winner takes the NESCAC’s automatic berth to the NCAA Division III Championship.
For our money, Tufts are still the team to beat, and it’s not close on paper. But Middlebury have now won a game they had no right to win, and teams that do that in quarter-finals tend to believe anything in semis.
Related:
https://sportscursor.com/us-college-saturday-cornell-penn-ramsey-american-lehigh-31-october-2026/
https://sportscursor.com/us-college-saturday-brown-dartmouth-smith-desales-marywood-31-october-2026/
