After
having to postpone the game for a day due to some dicey weather we ended up
getting a decent day for a game yesterday up in Lewiston. Some of you out
there might not consider 29 degrees and a howling wind decent but after
experiencing the weather we've practiced in this year it was a relatively
pleasant day!
The final
score ended up being 14-12 but looks a lot closer than it was for much of the
game. I credit the Bates team for playing hard until the final whistle
and giving us all we could handle.
While it's
never a good thing to let up 12 goals in a game, I think we were able to take
away some good things from this one and it definitely showed us what
we can improve on. On the positive side we were able to generate a
lot of good looks on offense in our 6v6 offense. We didn't
take a ton of shots in this game, but we did take high percentage shots and
buried them. We faced off pretty well with the return of Dave Campbell
and as he gets healthier and back into the swing of things I think that area
can be a strength of the team this year.
We jumped
out to an early 5-0 lead in the first quarter with some great offensive
possessions where we really made the Bates defense work for extended periods of
time. That trend would continue throughout the game as we would end up
scoring 11 of our 14 goals in settled 6v6 offense. While junior Matt
Ferrer had 5 goals off the bench for us, overall
it was a pretty balanced scoring day as 8 different guys ended up in the
goal column. Having said that we would like to start
generating more looks in transition, we don't want to have to score 10+ goals a
game in our settled offense. Other guys on offense who had nice days were
junior Tom Petty (2 goals), sophomore Pete Smith (1g,2a),
senior Rory Sanborn (2 goals), and junior Mike Stone (1g, 3a). It
was nice to see Mike creating for others as he's usually able to get his own
shot off fairly easily and didn't settle for anything less than a great
look. It was also nice to see Mike creating those opportunities
against their long stick middie which didn't seem to
bother him. Bates decided to shut off Jim Cabrera with a short stick and
while it managed to keep him in check (1g, 1a) it definitely opened up things
for our other offensive players.
Defensively
we played pretty well 6v6 but gave up 7 of their 12 goals in unsettled
situations. We simply have to improve in this area of the game and we
will. We have pretty good athletes in the midfield and they need to do a
better job of not creating any transition for our opponents, I'll leave it at
that for now. The only two performances worth noting on the defensive end
are that of James Guay who must have had 6 or 7
crushing hits over the course of the game and Frank Granara
at short stick defensive midfield. Frank does a lot of the little things
well and is excellent in helping us get the ball out of our defensive end in a
hurry.
Next up is
the Connecticut College Camel team that opened up their season with a loss to Bowdoin
8-6. I expect them to be fired up for this one down in