girls lacrosse
Eagles best of two champs
McDonogh builds 9-1 lead on WCAC title defender
to cruise to victory
McDonogh’s No. 1 girls lacrosse team turned Monday’s battle of champions with defending Washington Catholic Athletic Conference champ Bishop Ireton (Va.) into a lopsided victory pretty early.
The eight-time defending Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland A Conference champions built a 10-goal lead by halftime and rolled to an 18-5 victory to extend their national-record win streak to 166 games.
The host Eagles (11-0) used their usual dominance on the draw and stinginess on defense, along with an improved patience on attack, to beat their second WCAC power in three days. They won, 11-5, over Good Counsel on Saturday.
“I think it helps us to play these teams so there’s going to be no surprises going forward,” Eagles coach Chris Robinson said. “Bishop Ireton plays a really good zone defense. Good Counsel was a really athletic, awesome man-to-man. Different styles, different types of players, so when we go back against our IAAM competition, we’re hopefully not seeing anything new.”
Against Bishop Ireton, from Alexandria, Va., the Eagles gave up the first goal to Sydney Foster on a free position before reeling off nine straight. Catie May’s extra-man goal on a feed from Julia Hoffman gave them a 9-1 lead with 8:11 left in the first half.
The Cardinals (6-5) got one back before Emma Schettig, Rachel Anderson and Blaire Pearre finished off the half for a 12-2 lead to start the running clock with the 10-goal margin that lasted the rest of the game.
Schettig led the Eagles with four goals and an assist, while May had three. Andie Aldave had a goal and two assists.
The halftime score might have been more lopsided if not for Cardinals goalie Amelia Cole. The senior, who is headed to Denver, faced 27 shots in the first half and made 13 of her 14 saves in the first 25 minutes.
The Eagles, however, got a lot of the ground balls off the rebounds and used them to keep firing away. They outshot the Cardinals, 37-11, in the game.
Six of those Cardinals’ shots, and three goals, came in the final 14 minutes, after Robinson had subbed for starting goalie Julia Cooper (two saves) and much of the starting defensive unit. By then, goals from Maddie Jenner, May, Julia Dorsey and Isabelle Webster had pushed the lead to 16-2.
The Eagles defense continues to be about as stingy as a lacrosse team can be, allowing just 4.5 goals per game. Only one team has managed to score more than six on Cooper and a field defense led by Nicole Alecce, Margaret Donovan, Dorsey, Hannah Rothe and Ava Class.
“Each practice we really get down to the basics of footwork, good stick position, no fouls and really making sure that when you are one-on-one with a girl, it’s body all — no stick, no swinging,” Alecce said. “Big on communicating with everyone and making sure the whole defensive unit is on the same page to make sure no mistakes are made, but kudos to coach Scott (Robinson) for giving us all the pointers and to all the girls who really put in the hard work at practice.”
Coming into the game Bishop Ireton had suffered its four losses by a total of six goals, but against an Eagles team winning by an average margin of 12.5 goals they struggled from the draw.
Eagles center Jenner won nine draws and, when she wasn’t snatching them out of the air, her teammates were controlling them. When Kayla Abernathy and Dani Jacobstein took over for her on the draw, the Eagles were still able to win most of them, finishing with an 18-7 advantage.
“When we’re losing the draw battle, and we don’t find ourselves in that situation often but when we are, we’ve really got to value our possessions and we didn’t,” Bishop Ireton coach Rick Sofield said. “We rushed some shots, we had some turnovers. I think we had some jitters first half. We had some turnovers we don’t usually have especially in our clear and I think that’s what happens when you’re playing the tough teams. Good teams make you make mistakes.”
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