The boys in blue showed up to play yesterday at Bowdoin on a beautiful April day and in front of your typical "friendly" alumni weekend crowd....

As I mentioned to the team last night as we pulled into town, I feel the past three days since our Amherst loss have been our best of the year. It started in practice on Thursday as you couldn't help but see a different level of intensity and focus on the field. We definitely carried that focus and competitive fire into yesterday.

After going up 3-0 early on and 4-2 with 4 minutes to play in the first quarter, we gave up 4 goals in the last 3 minutes! Bowdoin led 6-4 heading into the 2nd quarter but from that point on we would completely take over the game by outscoring them 6-1 in the 2nd and 3-1 in the 3rd to take a 13-8 lead.

The player that got us going in the 2nd quarter was David Hild who ended up receiving the game ball for his 5 goal, 3 assist effort. While the 8 points were a career high for David, the thing that impressed me the most was simply seeing him bounce back to have such a big game after arguably the worst of his career against Amherst. The way he played in those two games sum us up as a team as well. We didn't play much team offense against Amherst where as yesterday we had assists on 11 of our 16 goals.

Tim Cahill also finished with 5 goals while Andrew Conner picked up 3 goals and his first assist of the year!

Defensively we didn't play our best game but quite honestly I think Bowdoin has some of the most talented offensive midfielders we've seen all year.

#39 for them, Kit Smith has to be one of the top athletes we've ever gone against in my days at Middlebury. He plays on the wing on face offs, can play d-middie and shoots the ball as hard as anyone. It doesn't hurt that he's 6-3, 220. He's complimented by some other dangerous middies who put a lot of pressure on our defense. Fortunately our guys never stopped competing and came up with some big stops which kept our transition game going throughout the game.

If we can continue to improve the way we have over the past few days I think we could be in for a good run down the stretch. We'll see....

Next up we have the Skidmore Thoroughbreds on Tuesday who are currently 8-1 and ranked #13 in last week's USILA poll. I'm off to watch a little film, enjoy the rest of your weekend!