After a promising start, the Salisbury girls soccer team has had to battle through a difficult midseason schedule.

The team has lost seven of its last eight games and is fighting to stay in contention for a spot in the district playoffs. Last week’s schedule had a stretch of four games in four days beginning with Notre Dame of Green Pond (10-2-0) and ending with Northwestern Lehigh (13-1-0).

The games all went into the loss column for Salisbury with three of the games resulting in shutouts.

The Crusaders downed Salisbury 7-0 to start the week, and the next night saw the team lose a heartbreaker by a 3-2 score at Pen Argyl. Palmerton then shut out the Falcons 7-0 and Northwestern put in nine goals in the third shutout of the stretch.

Goalie Kacie Kaough, who has been doing double duty this fall playing both soccer and tennis, was peppered with shots as the Tigers had 22 shots on goal in the game with Kaough able to stop 13 of them.

In the first half alone, Northwestern had 16 shots on goal. Kaough had six saves in the first 10 minutes of the game. Salisbury managed just one shot on goal in the contest against one of the better defenses in the Colonial League.

“Everybody knows how tough Northwestern is,” said Salisbury head coach Rick Babyak. “That combined with our schedule made things really tough on the girls tonight, but they went out and tried their best to compete.

“They’re still smiling and they still have some energy left, but it was a rough stretch. I’m going to give these girls a lot of credit for getting through that. We played three of the top teams in that stretch and I’m proud of them because they played well and kept going at it, so that makes me proud.”

Statistics for other games were not available.

Salisbury is now 5-8-0 overall and 3-8-0 in league games. With the league playoffs probably out of reach, the Falcons are still aiming for a spot in districts.

The schedule this week has a home game against Catasauqua (0-13-0) and a game at Moravian Academy (5-4-4). A pair of wins would go a long way to helping the Falcons’ cause for a playoff spot. Needing to win out to reach districts, the main obstacle is a game against Southern Lehigh on next week’s schedule.

“We’re going in the right direction,” said Babyak. “We’re a little small, but we have a good core and they’re good players and learning how to be better. We can learn from things like this, and I see a lot of positives coming out of this season. It’s not an overnight thing, but we’re definitely taking steps to get better.”