CARY -- The Carolina RailHawks' task today is simple: Just win the game.
In the USSF D-2 Pro League playoffs, teams play a home-and-away series in each round. At the end of the two games, the leader in total goals advances to the next round.
So after a 0-0 draw Wednesday with the NSC Minnesota Stars in Blaine, Minn., the NASL Conference champion RailHawks won't have to crunch too many numbers tonight at home (7 p.m., WakeMed Soccer Park). A win advances Carolina to the semifinals, simple as that.
"It's easier because you just want to win the game. It's like any other game," defender Daniel Woolard. "It makes it easier to be even, especially with the way we've played at home."
Across the rest of the D-2 playoffs, the rest of the higher seeds - the top-seeded Rochester Rhinos, the No. 3-seeded Austin Aztex and the No. 4-seeded Portland Timbers - all lost 2-0 in the first game of their two-game series.
"All those teams lost away from home, and we managed to keep it all square away from home," RailHawks coach Martin Rennie said. "I think those teams will be feeling the pressure."
But there will be plenty of pressure on the RailHawks as well.
The team is still looking for the franchise's first playoff win, its first playoff goal and its first trip to the second round of the playoffs. And they're doing it against the only team that hasn't allowed a RailHawks goal this year. Minnesota is 2-0-1 in three meetings against Carolina.
"It's not gone unnoticed in my mind that we haven't scored on them yet," Rennie said. "But all the [other] games don't matter now."
The second seed in this postseason, the RailHawks were second in the league in goals scored and were shut out just seven times in 30 league games.
Only once did that happen in back-to-back contests.
"We have been scoring goals lately," defender Kupono Low said. "It hasn't happened this year when [Tom Heinemann] went two games without scoring. I don't know when the last time was when we went two games without scoring."
Heinemann, like Woolard and teammate Devon McKenney, was a late-season addition to the RailHawks as injuries took their toll.
The RailHawks are now without all four of their opening-day back-line defenders.
The new additions have blended well, though, well enough that Rennie says his team has peaked at the right time.
It's not much different, Rennie said, than how in his previous coaching stop with the now-defunct Cleveland City Stars he won a USL-2 championship in his second year.
"If everything is going easy and going well the whole way through the season, you don't learn as much as you should learn," Rennie said. "[The adversity] has made us grow together as a group, and ultimately it's helping us at this point."
