Point Park University only faces competition in men’s soccer from four schools in the new conference, and the Pioneers play each of those teams one time this season.This weekend, the Pioneers played half of their Kentucky Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (KIAC) schedule in less than 24 hours.Facing matchups with top ranked Asbury University on Friday, and Brescia University on Saturday, the team collected wins against both schools in dramatic fashion.But before the Pioneers could get on the road to play the two Kentucky universities, they had their first home game of the season against National Collegiate Athletic Association Division III team Allegheny College on Wednesday night.Allegheny came in with a 4-0 record on the season and had shut out the last three teams it faced.Shot after shot peppered each team’s goalkeeper in the first half, but they continued to make saves. Point Park senior forward Francis Tabi came closer than anyone to scoring a goal when he hit the left goalpost with a shot, but the Allegheny defense quickly deterred the threat. After one half of play, there was no score.In the second half, both teams played carefully as offensive chances did not come often. With a little more than 18 minutes left in the second half, Allegheny senior midfielder David Del Greco broke that trend as he slipped through the Pioneers defense and scored the lone goal of the game. Allegheny went on to win with a score of 1-0.Despite the loss, head coach Jeroen Walstra seemed encouraged by his team’s performance.“Things are improving, so I am not worried about this,” Walstra said after the game. “Today I saw a couple other players play for quite a while and they got some experience. I think a lot of the problems that we’ve had before were solved.”One of the players Walstra got to look at for the first time in a game was Jonty Loukes, a freshman midfielder.“It’s been a longtime coming; I’ve been practicing with the guys all season,” Loukes said following the game. “I’ve been itching to get on the field and it just felt great to get out there. I know it wasn’t a great result, but the minutes under the belt are important right now and it felt good to get a full night in.”Loukes had not played until that game because he had a problem securing his eligibility with the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. Loukes is one of 18 new additions to the team this year, many of whom are playing significant roles. Loukes talked about the talent that the team possesses and what they need to do in order to succeed.“Just because we’ve got 11 great players on the field doesn’t make us a great team,” he said. “We have to bond together, we have to know how each other play and I think as we play more together you’ll see our chemistry and we’ll start to click.  Hopefully we’ll start to peak at the right time come the end of the season.”The weekend brought the team to Kentucky for two crucial conference games.“If we can beat Asbury and Brescia both, then we improve the chances of having home field advantage when we go into the playoffs, and in that sense it’s important,” Walstra said. “But I want to send a message to Asbury anyway, I just want to win.”Against Asbury, the team which had been picked to win the conference in the preseason coach’s poll, Point Park got on the board early with a goal from senior midfielder Alex Sala. Asbury trailed the rest of the way until they scored with less than five minutes left to tie the game 1-1, and soon thereafter regulation ended and the game went into overtime. Neither team scored in the 10-minute overtime following regulation, so the game went into a second overtime. With just over a minute remaining, junior defender Frazer McKinlay got control of the ball and scored, giving Point Park the 2-1 win. With the goal coming late in the second overtime, the team narrowly averted having to settle for a draw because if no goal had been scored after 110 minutes, the game would have ended in a tie.“In our game against Asbury, [we] showed that we’re starting to get together as a team,” junior defender Filippo Martinuzzi said on the phone Saturday night. “We fought together to win that game – after 19 minutes [of overtime] we wanted it more.”The Pioneers then moved on to play Brescia in their second conference game in as many days. The team got off to a slow start in the first half and found themselves behind 2-0 at halftime. “We were mentally a little bit off, and in the first half we were struggling,” Martinuzzi said.