Enrique Banuelos (Mexico City, Mexico/Virginia) and Diego Sanz (Mompia, Spain/La Marina) were on the scoresheet as the Northern Illinois University men’s soccer team closed the preseason with a 2-0 victory at Detroit on Saturday afternoon (Aug. 20).

“There were things that we identified in the Marquette game that we wanted to focus on, and I thought we did a good job of that,” said NIU head coach Ryan Swan. “We were better today than we were on Monday (against Marquette) which is a positive thing. There are still areas that we need to clean up, but I was happy with the performance, we scored two goals and I thought we should have had a couple more.”

Following a week of training that saw the Huskies looking to finetune the attacking side of the ball, Banuelos tallied in the first half and Sanz converted from the penalty spot in the second half. Swan was pleased to see the work on the training field transfer over into Saturday’s final friendly.

“We focused on some of the attacking things today and we were really happy with our possession and our buildup,” said Swan. “We scored a really nice goal in the first half and a penalty in the second, but we really created a lot of good opportunities, we probably should have put the game to bed before that.”

Martin Sanchez (Bloomington, Minn./Kennedy) and Nolan Cosgrove (Chesterfield, Mo./Tulsa) combined to record the clean sheet in goal for the Huskies who now look forward towards the regular season opener less than a week away.

“We are happy with where we are at,” said Swan. “We know that there are things we have to work on, I think the guys know it and we talked about it after the game, but everyone left today pretty happy with the progress that has been made and if we continue that we will be ready for the trip out to California next week.”

The Huskies will head west to begin the regular season next week as they travel to California for the first time since 2014. NIU will open at San Francisco on Thursday, Aug. 25, before visiting St. Mary’s on Sunday, Aug. 28.