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!