Grace Ehlert has scored in three of the Bears last four games. (Bri Nitsberg | Managing Photo Editor)

The No. 1 WashU women’s soccer team has a saying: “Pressure is a privilege.” 

Over the last two weeks, the Bears have seen plenty of pressure, taking on their top-two challengers in the highly competitive University Athletic Association (UAA). After a 3-0 win over No. 7 Carnegie Mellon University on Oct. 25, the Bears faced off against No. 15 University of Rochester, ranked second in the conference, with the UAA championship on the line.

In the face of pressure, the Bears excelled once again, beating the Yellowjackets 2-0 to earn their second-straight UAA championship and an automatic bid to the 2024 NCAA tournament. The conference title is the 17th in program history, and the Bears have now won nine of the last 10 conference championships.

The Bears also clinched the UAA’s automatic qualifier to the NCAA tournament. WashU has been ranked as the top team in the nation for the last eight weeks. After a run to the national championship game last season, the Bears are one of the favorites in the NCAA tournament once again. 

“The team is pretty excited. [Winning the UAA] is one of our goals we set at the beginning of the season, and it’s just an important step for all the goals we have after it,” sophomore midfielder Sophie Viscovich said. “It was a good team effort … we go one game at a time. We’ve been doing that all season, and glad it worked out in our favor.”

The Bears entered the matchup against Rochester with some history. Last season, the Bears were in a similar setting — undefeated, at the top of Division III, and looking to win a UAA title — when the two teams met. In that matchup, Rochester became the first team to score on the Bears all season and spoiled their celebrations with a 2-1 defeat.

This year, the Bears came out ready to play, putting Rochester’s backline under stress early on. In the eighth minute, a corner kick from Viscovich found junior Grace Ehlert, who knocked the ball into the back of the net to score her 12th goal of the season and give WashU an early 1-0 lead. Ehlert was named the UAA’s Offensive Player of the Week for the second time this season.

“Each week, set pieces is something we like to focus on a lot, just knowing that everyone needs to understand their role and be ready to follow through with that role on the field,” Viscovich said. “Grace did a great job of knowing where she needed to be, and then just placing that ball to where I trusted her to be and her having a great finish.”

Rochester began to get back into the game. Graduate-student goalkeeper Sidney Conner was forced to come off her line to deny Claire Grover, one of Rochester’s leading scorers, on a one-on-one breakaway in the 23rd minute. A few minutes later, Conner made a diving save to keep a header out of the net. Conner, who made a season-high four saves in the win, was named the UAA’s Defensive Player of the Week.

“I give credit to Rochester — they came out pretty hard — but I think our defense did a really good job,” Conner said after the match. “We always say that our defense starts with our offense, and so I give credit to our forwards and our midfield for stopping their attack most of the time, and then once they were able to get through, I really trusted my back three.”

Senior Olivia Foster and the Bears backline shutout Rochester for their 13th clean sheet this season. (Dania Backal | Contributing Photographer)

WashU came close to doubling their lead with four minutes left in the half when junior Kaci Karl’s header ricocheted off the crossbar. Rochester’s second-team All-UAA goalkeeper Grace Kuropatkin made six of her career-high nine saves in the first half to keep the scoreline at 1-0 going into halftime.

In the second half, the Bears midfield, led by Karl and Viscovich, controlled possession of the ball in the middle of the pitch, and the potent WashU attack outshot the Yellowjackets 11-1. 

“We knew going in it was going to be a 3v3 matchup in the midfield, so just understanding our role and following our mark, making sure it was a one-to-one personal battle for each ball,” Viscovich said. “I think all the midfielders did a great job, and wingers, forwards, coming back and helping us with that as well to get numbers up.”

In the 79th minute, first-year Olivia Clemons received the ball from fellow first-year Cami Colpitts, muscled her way past a Rochester defender, and beat Kuropatkin for her fifth goal in four games to double the Bears lead. Clemons has been a threat off the bench for the Bears, and her 17 goals in a single season are the most for any WashU player since 1998.

“She just has a good vision of how the game is going and what her gifts can do to help us out. We’ve got a bunch of selfless women that are working really hard and just doing what’s being asked of them, and so I couldn’t be prouder of how we’re handling things right now,” head coach Jim Conlon said.

The Bears defense, led by senior Emma Riley McGahan and graduate student Ally Hackett — both of whom played all 90 minutes — held firm as the clock wound down. When the clock hit zero, the Bears rushed the field to celebrate the conference-clinching win.

The top-ranked Bears have one more regular season game before the NCAA tournament, where they will likely host first-round games as one of the top seeds. Next weekend, they will travel to take on the University of Chicago, looking to cement an undefeated regular season for the first time since 2018.

Though the UAA win is an exciting moment for the Bears, the team’s work is not finished, and the Bears will continue leaning into the pressure as they chase their ultimate goals in the postseason.

“It’s easy to not have any pressure on you and just kind of go through life one step at a time. But in this case, we’re winning and we’re trying to do bigger things, and that obviously puts a little bit of pressure on you when you’re trying to win something that a lot of people want,” Conlon said. “We just try and take the mentality of getting better one day at a time and continuing to grow a little bit.”

This article was originally published on Nov. 3 at 1:54 p.m., and was updated at 3:42 p.m. to make grammatical edits.