We played our most complete and best
game of the year on Saturday against a very good Tufts team in Alumni
Stadium. The game featured the top two scoring offenses in the NESCAC and
both teams showed why they've been lighting up the scoreboard so often this
season from start to finish on Saturday.
The story of the day was the way our
defense shut down the NESCAC's leading scorer, #28 for Tufts, DJ
Hessler. He's one of those players that has a great feel for the game and
in addition to excellent skills, knows how to manipulate the defense to get
what he wants. We put Matt Rayner on him to start the game and Matt
was a thorn in his side all day long. The 2nd part of the Tufts offense
that is so dangerous is the crease play of their two other attackmen. For
the most part we shut them down as well with sophomore Tyler Lovas earning his
first career start and doing an excellent job on Clem McNally the NESCAC's
leading goal scorer. Mike Quinn was on their other attackman and did a
nice job of shutting him down for most of the day.
Pete Britt had some fantastic saves
but his biggest contribution on the day was his ability to pick off passes from
#28 intended for one of their crease attackman on the backside pipe. He
must have picked off 4 or 5 on the day and those would have been layups on the
weakside.
Offensively we had another balanced
scoring day with Mike Stone and Skyler Hopkins both playing very well in the
midfield. Mike's game winning goal was a classic Mike Stone dodge from up
top on their back up lsm where he split to his left and ripped a shot to the
upper corner from about 9 or 10 yards out.
Tufts had two chances to tie in the
last few minutes as we stopped them once and then failed to clear the
ball. On the second chance we played a few on ball picks very well and
came up with another stop as time ran out. Big win for the boys, tomorrow
we head down to Skidmore for another tough mid-week game.
Wish us luck!