Men’s soccer (1-0-1) took home a 3-0 victory over the Quinnipiac Bobcats (0-2) Sunday at the Northwestern Lakeside Classic in Evanston as sophomore Chris Paton, freshman Len Heinson and senior Andrew Palumbo netted their first career goals.

After playing the Hofstra Pride (0-1-1) to a scoreless draw Friday, the Huskies saw some improvement in Sunday’s victory.

“I didn’t think we were very good on Friday,” said head coach Eric Luzzi. “We definitely battled Friday. We competed. We willed ourselves to a shutout and made sure we at least got a point out of it, but today we were quite good. We were good on the ball, [had a] good cut-throat mentality in the attack and defensively [we were] very solid.”

Hofstra

Friday, the Huskies missed their opportunities to score.

Senior Isaac Kannah had a chance to put NIU in front in the 19th minute, but his low shot was saved in a diving effort by Hofstra goalkeeper Patric Pray.

NIU had a scoring chance in the 27th minute as Kannah found sophomore Derek Ott, who got a shot off inside the box, but it was blocked. Bertrand Gaschot followed up, knocking the ball away from Pray and into the net, but he was called for a foul.

Missed chances continued into overtime, and the match ended as a scoreless draw.

“Hofstra was a hard team to play against,” Luzzi said. “They are very physical and have a lot of big guys. We are not a particularly big team so that made it difficult to play a lot of soccer, but I thought our guys did well to manage that kind of a game … .”

Quinnipiac

Sunday, the Huskies earned their first win with a 3-0 beating of Quinnipiac.

“We played 18 or 19 guys today and not one person had a bad day, so I think that is a good statement as to how deep our team is, and we are going to need that throughout our long season, and we will call upon that depth pretty much every game,” Luzzi said.

Paton put the Huskies in front in the 29th minute off a rebound from a corner kick.

“It was just a scramble in the box. The ball came down and I just struck it with my leg and it hit the back of the net. I was very happy about it,” Paton said.

“… I feel that the mid-fielders played very well and the defenders kept a clean sheet again and we were able to find the back of the net multiple times, which is an improvement from Friday. We were also able to get the balls out a lot more and passed it better as a team and pressured much better than we did on Friday.”

After the half, Heinson put the Huskies up 2-0 in the 56th minute, blasting a shot past Quinnipiac goalkeeper Borja Angoitia from 16 yards out.

“There weren’t many thoughts on my goal. I just kicked the ball and it went in,” Heinson said.

NIU finished the scoring in the 80th minute as Palumbo scored on a penalty shot, placing the ball under Angoitia.

“I was very excited to finally score a goal in the regular season and very happy that we got the win today and made it 3-0 to completely finish up the game,” Palumbo said. “… [There was] a lot of energy and we finally were finishing our chances, which is a big improvement. …

“We could have actually scored a couple more goals, but at least we scored three goals today. I think as long as we keep putting our chances away and improve our finishing we will have a lot of goals this season.”