Injuries have put a damper on the Huskies field hockey team’s season so far.

The Huskies took a rough road trip to face some of the nation’s top teams and came back wounded and defeated. NIU suffered shut out losses to Boston University and Northeastern University, a perenial top-10 team, last weekend. Stitches, a broken nose, black-eye, and a season ending knee injury round up the wounds the 1-5 Huskies are licking.

Don’t expect head coach Laurie Bell to be fretting and using the injuries as excuses for the Huskies lack of on-field performance.

“We anticipated that we would have problems scoring goals and stopping people from scoring on us. The injuries make things much tougher for us,” Bell said.

The injuries put the Huskies in a desparate situation against Northeastern. At one point, NIU did not have any substitutes. One of the back-up goalies had to play the field. Also, three freshmen were playing critical field positions.

“We have freshmen playing when they’re not ready to play, we have people who are not playing their regular positions. There’s not a whole lot we can do right now,” Bell said. “We still have difficulties scoring goals, and our young goalies have a difficult time stopping goals. We just have to take advantage of more scoring opportunities.”

Things do not get easier for Bell and her crew. The Huskies have their conference season starting Friday against Northwestern in Evanston. “Some years you only have a few injuries, other years you have several; this year we have several. We just need to make adjustments to equalize the injuries,” Bell said.