WINONA, Minn. — A year ago, the Saint Mary's University women's soccer team struggled to generate any type of offense — managing just two goals during their 18-game season.

The Cardinals equaled that offensive output in one game when they beat Marian 5-1 earlier this season.

Since then, SMU has scored three more times — nothing spectacular, but certainly an improvement over a year ago.

And improvement is the name of the game for the Cardinals.

In each of their two games last week, the Cardinals' offense continued to show signs of that improvement, scoring single goals against both UW-Stout and Augsburg.

Problem was, both goals came with the Cardinals trailing 3-0, as SMU saw its losing streak climb to six straight, falling to the Blue Devils and Auggies by identical 3-1 scores.

"Our goal is to make sure that we continue to improve from day to day and game to game," said SMU coach Dan Blank. "And I think we've made some strong steps in the right direction.

"We played two very good games — games that I felt we controlled for a large portion of the time," said Blank. "Anytime a game is closely played like those two games (last week) were, it's the little things that are going to make the difference.

"And that's what happened to us — we made some mistakes in coverages, and both Stout and Augsburg capitalized. It's those little things that are the difference between winning and losing."

In Saturday's loss to Augsburg, it wasn't the little things that did in the Cardinals, it was one big thing — Millie Suk.

Suk got the Auggies on the board at the 11:23 mark, then netted her second of the game and team-leading fifth of the season 13 minutes later as Augsburg took a 2-0 advantage into the halftime intermission.

"Their two goals in the first half really took the wind out of our sails, because at the time, we were dominating," said Blank, whose team outshot the Auggies 8-5 in the first half. "We had some very good chances, but couldn't convert and they come down and put two by us just like that."

Emily Anderson pushed the Auggies lead to 3-0 midway through the second half, before Diane Schirmers (Prior Lake, Minn.) closed out the scoring with her third of the season 12 minutes later.

"It was good to see DIane get that goal," said Blank of his freshman forward. "We struggled so much to score goals last year (managing just two all season), it's good to see us finally getting our offense going a bit."