ESPN College Sports Blog

Posted by Graham Hays

Goals: Kerri Hanks, Notre Dame (13th minute); Nicole Smith, Georgetown (17th minute); Melissa Henderson, Notre Dame (18th minute); Courtney Barg, Notre Dame (51st minute)

It used to be that Notre Dame's first team could sometimes get a better run from its reserves in practice than it did on the road in the Big East. Thanks in no small part to the kind of progress made by talented coaches like Georgetown's Dave Nolan, that's not necessarily the case these days. But even in the face of determined resistance from the Hoyas, the nation's top-ranked team demonstrated Friday there still aren't many opponents in the conference -- or the country -- who can stay with the Fighting Irish when they wear out the grass around the scorer's table with waves of substitutions.

Notre Dame's opening goal came from the usual suspects, with Brittany Bock drawing a foul in the box that fellow senior Kerri Hanks subsequently converted from the penalty spot (Hanks added a second-half assist to move into a tie with former Penn State star Christie Welsh for 10th all time in points in the NCAA). But the Fighting Irish overwhelmed the Hoyas with the kind of depth usually reserved for hockey arenas. The kind of depth that comes with adding one of the nation's best recruiting classes to a roster that returned the majority of key contributors from last season's College Cup squad.

"I like where we are with our team," Notre Dame coach Randy Waldrum said after his team improved to 13-0-0 overall and 6-0-0 in league play. "The younger players have got some experience now; they had a lot of those big games early in the year against the Carolinas and the Dukes and the Penn States and so forth. And I think that they're ready."

Notre Dame's second goal came just 82 seconds after Georgetown had tied the game at 1-1. Freshman Melissa Henderson may or may not have been offside when she collected the ball inside the box off a flick from Julie Scheidler and fired it into Georgetown's net -- Nolan earned a yellow card for his protest on the play and was ejected at halftime for continued objections to the refereeing. But Henderson, rated by some as the nation's top recruit, is quick enough and instinctive enough in going for the final ball that she's going to leave a lot of flags wavering in the hands of assistant referees over the course of the next four years.

As Waldrum said, "Early on, when everybody really liked her from the beginning, I kept saying, 'I don't think she's even come close to her full stride yet.' And I think she'd be the first to tell you she's not completely full stride, but I would say the last three weeks of the season, she's really, really come on. … The amazing thing with it is when you look at the time she's had playing, she's not playing 90 minutes [a game]."

It wasn't just Henderson. Fellow freshman Courtney Barg came up with the second goal, making a perfect run through the Hoyas and trusting Hanks, one of the best passers in the country, to thread the needle and put her in alone on goal.

"I think she has done extremely well in the last month of the season," Waldrum said of Barg. "We had some fitness concerns with her early. And we had some concerns with her in terms of just defending, because in youth soccer, if you're a good player, you don't have to defend -- everybody else does the work for you. So once we got her used to what we're asking her to do, she's really come on.

"She could be one of our most skillful players we've ever had at Notre Dame."

All told in Friday's game, which found Notre Dame comfortably in control throughout but never on cruise control, eight players came off the bench for the Fighting Irish. That depth arguably the most noticeable differences between teams that entered the day as two of only four remaining undefeated teams in the seven major conferences in women's soccer. The difference between a program on the rise and a championship favorite.

"I just felt like the last couple of years in the Final Four, we wore Kerri Hanks and Brittany Bock out, because they played so many minutes up front and carried us so much," Waldrum said. "I just felt like depth was going to be vital, to try and find 10 minutes here or there, or 20 minutes here and there, when we could spell them a little bit to make them more fresh in the end."