If you look at the season that Southern Lehigh is putting together in field hockey, there is an anomaly that stands out on the schedule.

The Lady Spartans (5-0-0 Colonial, 5-1-0 overall) allowed two goals in their season opener against Palmerton before stringing together shutout wins over Palisades, Northern Lehigh, and Catasauqua.

In their next game they lost to Oley Valley 8-3. How did that happen? Apparently, Oley Valley is somewhat of an all-star team with four of the top 100 players in the country and that’s how they scored eight times against the Lynx.

The Tigers were not able to bust through a tough man-to-man defense presented by Southern Lehigh and fell to the District 11 2A runners-up Tuesday at Tiger Stadium in a 2-0 game.

“It’s not a defense that we normally see in many other games, so the girls took a while to settle in and figure out,” said coach Lissa Opolsky. “We didn’t play a bad game. We had a good passing game going, we just couldn’t find that final push.”

With 12:17 left in the first quarter, Delaney Mack put the Spartans on the board when she scored from close range. While Northwestern was having trouble figuring out the Southern Lehigh defense, the Spartans were having their own difficulties as they tried to score against a Lady Tiger defense that had allowed just four goals in five games coming into the matchup.

The second quarter was spent with both teams flexing their muscles defensively and though both teams had some scoring opportunities, goalies Macey Reese of Southern Lehigh and Emma Yanders of Northwestern made stops on anything coming close to the cage.

“We had some early scoring opportunities and as the game unfolded, we got more and more of them and honestly, it came down to who made fewer mistakes,” said Opolsky. “We made some mistakes and they capitalized on them. They’re just too good of a team to make those mistakes and think they won’t capitalize on them.”

Just when it looked like the 1-0 lead would stand up going into the final quarter, Piper Gluck got a shot past Yanders and then put on a final move to make a follow up shot to put Southern Lehigh up 2-0.

Yanders made 10 saves in the game and faced nine penalty corners, coming up with big saves late in the game to keep the game at 2-0 and give her team a chance to win, but Reese was up to the challenge and turned in a strong performance.

“Sometimes you need a refresher on where you’re at and what you need to work on and they gave us a good opportunity to really see that we are doing really well on some things, but we have other things to work on,” said Opolsky. “That’s why we play them twice in a season when we don’t really have to anymore and that’s why we are playing Nazareth next week, because we’re looking for those games to help us grow.”

In the past week, the Tigers added to their wins by beating Palmerton (3-3-0, 4-3-0) and Wilson (4-2-0, 4-3-0). In the win over Palmerton, Cara Thomas had two unassisted goals.

The upcoming schedule has four straight road games starting with Catasauqua (0-5-0, 1-5-0) and Northern Lehigh (0-4-0, 0-5-0).