Women’s Lax ends regular season with a win

The Women’s Lacrosse team celebrated its last game of the regular season with a 20-11 win over Shenandoah University at Captains Field to clinch the USA South Conference regular season title. The scoring of midfielder Meghan Harkey, who had five goals and five assists, was the icing on the cake for her and the rest of the seniors on senior day.

The Captains jumped out to an early 4-0 lead, with solo goals from freshman attack Jessica Singer and Harkey, and two goals from sophomore midfielder Rachel Tomlinson. Shenandoah respond with a three-goal surge of its own to pull back within one.

Both teams continued to trade goals, but the Captains went on several runs of multiple goals to pull ahead 15-6 before halftime. The Captains’ last goal of the half came from freshman midfielder Ashton Marshall with nine seconds left on the clock. The Captains also had time to take one last shot on goal before time expired, but the shot came just a second too late.

Shenandoah opened the scoring in the second half with a free position goal from freshman midfielder Samantha Sisson. Harkey returned under a minute later with a free position goal of her own. Both teams traded another pair of goals before Shenandoah went on a three-goal run to narrow the margin to 17-11.

Shenandoah’s freshman goalkeeper Ashley Cross kept the Captains’ offense quiet for nearly 19 minutes until CNU scored three late goals to finish the game. Cross faced a barrage of shots from CNU, but none of them found their way into the net, and she managed 17 saves on the night.

“Overall, we just got a little too mental with our offense,” said CNU Head Coach Carolyn Raveia. “We were taking hurried shots when we didn’t need to. We’ll work on our overall composure and not forcing bad shots.”

Freshman goalkeeper Hannah Wilkerson recorded seven saves to improve to 11-2 for the season.

Harkey led the Captains with five goals on nine shots and added another five assists. Marshall also scored five for the Captains and Tomlinson contributed three. Senior defender Morgan Layton had two caused turnovers, giving her 52 for her career, just two shy of breaking the program record for career caused turnovers.

The Captains outshot Shenandoah 49-24 and won the ground ball war 23-8. With the win, CNU also grabbed the top seed, heading into the USA South Tournament in Burlington, N.C. next weekend.

“It was a good momentum change and we got a little bit of our swagger back,” said Raveia. “It also helps that we got the top seed heading into the tournament.”

The win was also a great way for seniors Harkey, Layton and midfielder Kaitlin Quigley to cap off their careers.

“It was definitely an emotional game for all of us,” said Harkey. “It’s great that we can say our last game here was a win.”

“We still had to fight for it,” added Layton, “but we came away the win and that’s what’s important.”

Posted by Pierce Yarberry on Apr 13 2011. Filed under Lacrosse, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.