Women’s Lacrosse takes down Falcons 16-4
GVL / Dominic Stankiewicz. Maggie Hammer, 3/19/22, Grand Valley State University Lacrosse Field, Grand Valley vs Notre Dame (Ohio)
Mar 21, 2022
The Grand Valley State University women’s lacrosse team (8-1) put on another offensive show March 19 against Notre Dame College (Ohio), (1-3), routing the Falcons 16-4 in their final game before starting GLIAC play.
In the first quarter, the scoring came early and often. Started off by fifth-year attacker Sophie Conroy on a free position shot making it 1-0 Lakers. Conroy went on to score four more first-quarter goals.
The Lakers ended the first quarter up 8-1 and continued to pile in on in the second quarter, ending the half up 12-2.
The Lakers finished the game 16-4 with a myriad of Lakers making their way into the box score. The top scorers for the Lakers were Conroy who finished with six goals, and graduate student midfielder Olivia Esposito who finished with three goals.
Also scoring for the Lakers was junior midfielder Kate DeYoung and sophomore midfielder Hailey Crittenden who both finished with two goals. Sophomore attacker Maddy Champagne, junior midfielder Molly Bursinger and freshman midfielder Ashleigh Rothe all rounded out the Lakers scoring with one goal each.
After scoring six of the Lakers’ 16 goals in the game, Conroy gives all the credit to the execution of the team offense displayed by the Lakers.
“It was such a good team offense,” Conroy said. “A lot of my goals came from assists. The team was feeding the ball right to my stick and that helped all of it. Playing against a zone is different because you get different looks and it was a lot of assisted goals that I have my team to thank for.”
Coach Mackenzie Lawler was happy with the Lakers’ hot start to the game.
“I thought we came out with great energy right from the start,” Lawler said. “It was a long stretch of spring break playing six games in ten days, and just being back on campus, really being able to get together in practice, I thought we looked really, really sharp. It was great to see that, and our play at a high intensity and speed with only having one game this weekend.”
After winning by 12 goals, it’s hard to find areas they’ll need to work on, but Lawler saw a few things the team will want to clean up in practice.
“Defensively I think we need to just finish out sets,” Lawler said. “We had a lot of great plays and then would just miss a ground ball, miss one slide and just really finish that last five percent of a play. Offensively we got a little too relaxed with our shooting in the second half, and still had great looks but didn’t finish on those. So making sure that we’re seeing the back of the net is going to be important for the upcoming games.”
Now that the Lakers are heading into GLIAC play, Lawler said the team will be ramping up practices to make sure they’re prepared for the games ahead.
“For us, we just focus on getting better as a team every day in practice,” Lawler said. “We’re really able to go high intensity seven versus seven with the starters we have and our really strong bench. We feel that if we’re making practice more difficult than our conference games then we’re going to be in really good shape.”
This weekend, the Lakers will compete against Concordia University, St. Paul on Friday, March 25 and Upper Iowa University on Sunday, March 27 for two home games.
