BROWNS SUMMIT — The UNC Pembroke soccer team’s season did not get off to a fast start.

But after turning it around to the tune of a 12-match unbeaten streak, the Braves faced the last team to beat them in Sunday’s Conference Carolinas Tournament championship — and this time, the start was decisively quicker.

The Braves scored twice in the first three minutes, then held on the rest of the way, in a 2-1 win, claiming the conference tournament crown for the third straight season.

“I don’t know what the statistics are, but winning three championships in a row, I don’t care if it’s ping-pong, table tennis, whatever sport it is, whether it’s on the men’s side, women’s side, college, pro, winning three championships in a row (is hard),” UNCP coach Lars Andersson said. “Complacency is the most dangerous thing that can set in on a team like this; when it gets hard, do you go ‘well we’ve already won two rings, so if we don’t win this year it’s OK,’ or are you willing to still battle and fight through adversity. And we were a team that, in the beginning of the year, by our own standards had some struggles.”

UNCP (12-3-3) scored just 34 seconds into the match, when Ashleigh Harris found the back of the net for a lead the Braves would not relinquish.

“We came out with a lot of energy,” Harris said. “Mercy (Bell) comes back to win the ball, passes it to Anna (Grossheim), Anna does a first-time touch up to me, and I was able to settle it and place it with my left foot. It was just really exciting. The energy was definitely there, and we knew when we came out we had to stay focused.”

Harris has now scored eight goals in the last 10 matches — after she hadn’t scored through the first six in which she played this season — as a key part of the Braves’ success.

“(My dad) came out for senior night, and I got a hat trick whenever he came out, and I feel like ever since that game, I’ve just got a lot more confidence,” Harris said. “I’ve definitely been shooting a lot more. That’s definitely something that I kind of was missing at the beginning of the year; I wasn’t shooting as much, and if you’re not shooting you’re not scoring.”

“Her individual technical abilities, her ability to take players one-on-one, her dribbling skills, I have not seen the likes of it here at UNC Pembroke,” Andersson said. “That makes her dangerous at all times because she can break players down on the dribble, she can go 1-on-3 and somehow come out the winner.”

Just moments later, three minutes into the contest, Bell charged toward the Belmont Abbey (11-3-4) goalkeeper for a one-on-one, then after a save, Abigail Lowry — a Pembroke native on her hometown team — kicked in the deflection.

“I think it started from the defense in the back, they all just kept pushing it forward,” Lowry said. “Mercy was going one-on-one with the goalkeeper, and the goalkeeper made a good stop, and it just bounced back out, and I just (finished).”

“I made the joke, we scored two goals before we got off the bus,” Andersson said. “We’ve had some games where we scored (quickly) — I don’t even think 34 seconds is a record — but I don’t think we’ve ever scored two goals inside three minutes.”

Harris and Lowry are just two of the players on hot streaks individually as the team has made its run collectively.

“We have four or five players that are not just playing their best football of this season, but the best football of their careers,” Andersson said, touting Harris, Lowry, Nicole Cook, Freya Lodge Whitham and Maria Cancio.

And that doesn’t even account for Bell — the Conference Carolinas Offensive Player of the Year who has scored 19 goals in her sophomore season and assisted on Lowry’s goal in the tournament final.

“When you have a player in the 15-plus goals a season, you’re not quite looking at a goal a game average, but close — and it’s almost like when the game begins, you’re going ‘well we’re up by 0.7 goals before the game starts.’” Andersson said. “You’re not going to have that every season in collegiate soccer. … When you have a player like that it changes everything.”

Belmont Abbey scored a goal just 3 1/2 minutes into the second half on a header by Logan Parry, making it 2-1. The Braves held off the Crusaders for the rest of the match — for a far more tense finish than in the team’s previous two conference championships.

“I don’t care who you’re playing, when you’re winning by a one-goal margin, that last five minutes just seems to become so frantic — and obviously when a championship is on the line it becomes more frantic,” Andersson said. “In the end it became a very close game; it’s the most difficult championship game we’ve played. In ‘21 we won 3-0 and last year we won 3-1. This year it was 2-1, and it was a narrow 2-1 margin.”

Belmont Abbey had defeated the Braves 4-3 on Sept. 19; after that match, the Braves had lost three of their first six matches of the season.

“I feel like we had a rough start to the season; I feel like we were off, and doubting how far we would get in the season, but I’m really excited how we kind of flipped everything around and we started doing our thing and winning again,” Bell said.

The change, the players said, came from within.

“Our captains really pulled us together,” Harris said. “We had a few meetings, and we actually had a meeting without the coaches, just to go over what our standards were, what we wanted to do, how we wanted to move throughout the conference. … It really helped bring us together, set that standard, make sure everybody was on the same page.”

The Braves have nine wins and three ties in the matches since, through the meat of the conference schedule and a 1-0 semifinal win over Barton on Friday in the conference tournament.

They’ll now take that streak into the NCAA Tournament, with the seventh-seeded Braves’ first-round match set for 6 p.m. Thursday at No. 2 Catawba (17-2-1).

“There’s not a weak team in that group of eight, so pick your poison, give us an opponent, and our job now is to break down film and set up for that opponent,” Andersson said. “Catawba’s a great team, they’re well-coached, they have some really special players — but I think we are as well, so I think it’ll be a great matchup and I’m looking forward to it.”