We lost another one goal game down in Hartford yesterday after having the lead for most of the game. This was a new way for us to come out with an L this year. A number of alums were on hand for the game and I'm tempted to take Chip Kenyon up on his offer to do the game write up today but instead will keep this brief so I can begin prepping for Skidmore on Tuesday.
Our team still has a lot to work on but there were some positives out there yesterday. I can't recall ever going 18-20 on face offs and one of our losses was going to be a fast break for us but instead hit the official's foot and Trinity came up with the GB. We scored three goals in transition off of face off wins but unfortunately gave up a fast break goal on our only other face off loss of the day.
Going into the Trinity game we felt that we'd have a significant advantage in the riding/clearing game and as it turned out, we had one of our worst clearing days of the year. To make matters worse, we gave up three easy goals off of our failed clears including Trinity's 8th goal to even things up in the last four minutes.
Finally, we were able to generate 52 shots against the Bantams but again were only able to muster 8 goals. Trinity's goalie is the best we've seen but our inability to finish was on full display again yesterday.
On a completely separate note, one other positive for the team these days is that we have a record 13 players that should be awarded ALL NESCAC Academic for this spring. That's over a third of our 36 eligible sophomores through seniors on the team this year. I can't speak for every generation of Middlebury lacrosse but I know we didn't have those kind of numbers when I was playing! Along those lines if anyone knows of any good lacrosse textbooks out there for me to hand out to the team let me know!
Next up is Skidmore on Tuesday, lots to talk about tomorrow after our performance yesterday. Skidmore is a little down this year from where they've been but have a few excellent players on offense. We'll need a great effort on Tuesday to get things going in the right direction and look forward to seeing what we're made of.