For the second time in as many games, the Cyclones allowed a goal in the first ten minutes of a game.

Last week, ISU coach Tony Minatta harped on his team about starting faster. That did not happen this week and it resulted in a pair of one goal losses for Iowa State.

Here is what the team had to say about their recent slow starts:

“Goals aren’t very numerous in soccer, so to kind of start one down, dig yourself a whole right away, it’s a little disheartening,” said Koree Willer.

“It’s encouraging to show that they had some fight to get back into it and put some pressure on them,” said ISU coach Tony Minatta. “We’re excited about some of those things, but at the end of the day, the start of overtime they came out wanting it more and we didn’t.”

“It’s something we can control and obviously it’s incredibly frustrating, but that’s in our hands, that’s on our shoulders and we need to work on that as a team,” said Madi Ott.

“It’s not something you can just talk about, it’s something you got to do,” Minatta said.

“It’s really frustrating, because it’s something we’ve been talking about,” Minatta said. “It’s almost as if this team feels things are going to happen for them the way they did against Pepperdine, but not remembering what they did against Pepperdine to get that result.”

“You give up a goal, you got to dig yourself out of it,” Minatta said. “It’s division one soccer, everyone is capable of putting the ball in the back of the net and then holding a lead.”

“It’s very frustrating that we can’t seem to get ourselves to play from the first whistle,” Minatta said.

“I had no doubt we could recover from that,” Willer said. “We have the ability to anyday, but at some point we have to figure out how to not get ourselves in that hole so we set ourselves up for the rest of the game.”

“It seems like the first five minutes is determining the result of a lot of our games so we got to figure that out,” Willer said.

“It’s a conscious choice and we all have to make that choice for each other,” Ott said.