Girls lacrosse
Jenner’s draws difference
Center helps control ball as Eagles pull away and coast to record 193rd straight win
Bryn Mawr’s Olivia Rubin will be very happy when she and McDonogh’s Maddie Jenner are playing together next year at Duke instead of playing against each other in the Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland A Conference.
No matter what Rubin tried Wednesday to counter Jenner on the draw, it didn’t work.
Jenner, last year’s All-Metro Player of the Year, won 13 draw controls and the No. 1 Eagles won 18 of 23 in the game to jump-start a 15-6 victory for their 193rd straight win.
For the past three years, opponents have pointed to the 6-foot-3 Jenner as the difference in many games as the Eagles’ winning streak has passed nine years. The 5-6 Rubin would agree.
“Obviously, Maddie does an amazing job. Her sheer height and size is such a threat and an advantage. Even if I’m jumping as high as I can, she’s still got three feet on me,” Rubin said, laughing as she added, “Well, not three feet, but it feels like it out there.”
Jenner and Rubin have been drawing against each other for years in club lacrosse and they played together on a Duke recruits team in Vail, Colo., last summer.
“She’s super strong and very tenacious, goes really hard, so I just had to match that strength,” Jenner said.
The No. 6 Mawrtians (9-4, 6-4 conference) stuck with the host Eagles early, taking a 2-1 lead on back-to-back goals from Rubin and Virginia Oursler. It didn’t help them to have to play without one of their top attackers, Alex Marino, who was sick.
The Eagles won four of the next five draws and scored five straight times, including two extra-man goals from Blair Pearre. The only time Bryn Mawr won the draw during that stretch, Eagles goalie Julia Cooper made one of her six saves.
A free-position goal by Rubin pulled the Mawrtians within 7-5 with 33.5 seconds left in the half, but Jenner won the last two draws to spark two quick goals. She scored on a free-position with 24.1 seconds left and Julia Hoffman scored with 2.6 seconds left for a 9-5 lead at the break.
In the second half, Jenner won the first five draws and the Eagles ran their lead to 14-5 on Hoffman’s fourth goal with 17:19 left. At that point, the Mawrtians hadn’t taken a shot in the half.
“The whole team gets really excited for Maddie when she’s getting all these draw controls,” Pearre said, “and when we can take it down the field and get that goal, it’s just super exciting because it started with Maddie and she’s just a big, big game-changer.”
The Eagles (16-0, 9-0) are in the midst of their toughest stretch of the season. The Mawrtians are the third of five Baltimore Sun top-seven teams McDonogh will play in 11 days. Before that, the Eagles defeated two of the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference’s best — Washington Post No. 1 Bishop Ireton and Good Counsel.
The nine-time defending conference champions beat No. 7 Archbishop Spalding on Friday and No. 5 Marriotts Ridge on Monday and have No. 3 Glenelg Country coming up Friday and No. 2 Notre Dame Prep in a rematch of last year’s A Conference championship game Monday.
The Mawrtians had suffered each of their previous three losses by a single goal.
“It’s a mix of things. They’re so talented,” said Bryn Mawr first-year coach Brooke Matthews. “They have good depth and two good groups of people that can go out there — and the draw is so crucial. That’s how you get possession and we didn’t even have the ball early in the second half.”
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