On Saturday, Oct. 24, Villanova’s women’s soccer team (9-1-5, 4-1-2 Big East) lost, 1-0, on the road, to Butler (7-4-4, 2-2-3 Big East). The loss was the team’s first since Oct. 25, 2025.
Saturday’s game ended the Wildcats’ 14-game unbeaten streak.
Despite Villanova outshooting Butler, 23-10, the team ultimately fell and has now gone 11 straight meetings without a win over Butler.
Going into the match, Villanova was confident it could take down the Bulldogs on Saturday, but knew it would be a hard-fought match.
“[Butler is] a good team, a very physical team,” head coach Samar Azem said. “So we knew it was going to be a battle. We felt like we were going to be very capable of winning that battle.”
However, Butler surprised the Wildcats with its mentality. Azem noted that the Bulldogs focused specifically on beating Villanova, rather than improving themselves.
“[Butler] came off a bye,” Azem said. “Which meant they had an extra four days to train, and what we saw was a Butler team, in my opinion, that took a week of training, and said, ‘We’re not trying to get better at being Butler. We have to find a way to take Villanova out of the game.’”
Villanova was not prepared for the physicality and specific targeting of Butler’s game plan. It was the first time Azem said that Villanova was successfully preyed on this season.
“It’s a position our team hasn’t been in before, of being the team with a target on our backs,” Azem said. “We’re used to being the chasers. We weren’t really prepared for that.”
At the end of the first half, the game remained scoreless, and the Wildcats led 9-4 in shots and 3-1 on frame.
In the 70th minute, Butler’s Elise May scored the only goal of the game, making Butler the second team this season to score first on Villanova. Princeton was the first, on Sept. 20 in a 1-1 draw.
After Butler’s goal, the Wildcats were determined to score, with five shots in the last 10 minutes. Senior Morgan Kotch ended with a career-best eight shots and five on goal, leading the team on Saturday.
“In the last 10 minutes, the team took on this underdog mentality that they’re so good at,” Azem said. “We were so unlucky not to get a goal. Their goalkeeper came up huge for a couple saves. They were clearing the ball off the lines. They were throwing their bodies like the ball was a grenade.”
Reflecting on the match, Azem hopes the last 10 minutes are how the Wildcats start every match: like they’re the underdogs from the get-go.
“That’s our takeaway,” Azem said. “That’s how we want to start games now, like we’re already behind.”
Villanova never let up. Despite the shock of being down for the first time since Princeton’s match on Sept. 20, the Wildcats kept pushing.
“They never hung their heads,” Azem said. “Butler scored, and they didn’t panic. They didn’t freak out. Everybody stayed composed, and if anything, they just got better as the match went on. They got more dominant. It wasn’t like they played the last 20 minutes in fear of losing. It wasn’t like they played the last 20 minutes bummed out that we were in that position for the first time all season. It was a maturity I was so proud to see.”
Looking ahead to Wednesday’s match against DePaul, women’s soccer hopes to use the loss as a meaningful experience which they might grow from rather than dwell on.
“For our team it was an experience,” Azem said. “You can use experiences one of two ways: you either just have them, and you feel a way about them, or you use them to get better. Our team is certainly using it to get better. We know that DePaul is going to do the same.”
On Wednesday, Oct. 28, Villanova will return home to play DePaul at the Higgins Soccer Complex at 3 p.m.
On Saturday, Oct. 31, the Wildcats return back to the road for the first time since Butler to play Marquette at 2 p.m.