“We didn’t handle it well,” he said Monday of the Tar Heels’ first road trip of the season. “We regrouped as a team and as a staff and said, ‘What are we good at and what do we need to work on?’ We felt that we had to make a few changes here and there, but really stick to the fundamentals. When you’re a young team, you’ve really got to pound away at doing the simple things right. And that’s what we got back to, the basics. It wasn’t a complete overhaul, but it was tweaking things a little bit in terms of practicing harder and paying attention to the details. It really was more of an approach rather than an event.”

North Carolina, which is ranked No. 9 in The Sun’s latest poll, has gotten a lot of mileage from its freshman class thus far. Attackman Nicky Galasso leads the offense in assists (11) and points (22), midfielder Duncan Hutchins has posted two points in each of his last three contests, Mark McNeill scored twice in the team’s 9-5 upset of Princeton, and faceoff specialist R.G. Keenan has won 64.1 percent (82-of-128) of his draws.

Breschi would have preferred acclimating the freshmen slowly, but injuries that sapped the team of its depth in the midfield forced his hand.

“This year is a lot different from last year and so forth, and I think we’ve tried to bring along the freshmen as slowly as we can, but they’ve been forced into roles,” Breschi said. “One of the things we keep telling them is, we’re going to get better once these guys gain experience. I credit the upperclassmen and assistant coaches of doing a tremendous job of getting them that confidence to handle those big games that we’ve been playing in. they’re starting to make plays, which is a great thing. We keep saying, ‘Just stay the course, focus on the details, and we’ll figure out who we are as we gradually go along.’ We’re playing eight or nine and sometimes 10 freshmen in the game, and they’re going to make mistakes. But I think if we can limit those by putting them in a position to make fewer, I think that’s been a positive for us. We’re not where we want to be, but we’re getting better, which is all we ask of our guys.”