We defeated Springfield 11-7 on Wednesday; it was an excellent victory for our team at this point in the season. The offense came out hot, setting a loose tone for the day. Our first two possessions were textbook. We had excellent time of possession, while putting constant pressure on the defense. We were dodging hard, moving the ball, cutting and getting excellent looks at the cage. We ended up taking an early 3-0 lead. Christopher Davis had 2 early goals on rips from the outside. A nice improvement from the Colby game was our Extra Man Offense. An EMO that was 1/10 against Colby ended the day 4-4 against Springfield. Sophomore Mark Foster and Freshman Jon Sisto both looked great on the EMO team. They are both lefties and they give us some great looks on their side, but also skipping the ball to the righty shooters. Sisto had one assist into Mike Saraceni on the crease and one cross cage to Charley Howe on EMO. Both were the correct looks to make, either he has great vision, great instincts or is lucky guesser!

The defense was strong again. John West had a great day taking the ball away from their star freshman attackman as well as pounding him and generally making life miserable for him. Their freshman will be an excellent college player (already is) but I think he learned some valuable lessons against West. Ed Brown had the challenging assignment of running with a speedy, shifty (5'4 140?) attackman that is a match up nightmare. If you don't have at least one defenseman on your team who can run, you can't cover this guy. Ed was exhausted by the end of the day, probably felt as if he had run a marathon at a sprinter's pace! Caleb Holmes did his usual job of quietly shutting down his attackman who ended up 0/0 on the day. The biggest story on defense was goalie, Eric Krieger, who ended the day with 14 saves, 1 assist and the game ball. He was tremendous between the pipes and also gave us several possessions on ground balls when the ball was loose and no one seemed to be able to get to it except Eric. On one of those gb's he ended up becoming the point man on the fast break and skipping the ball to the low righty attackman whose man had prematurely slid. He reminded me of Hieu Nguyen running the field!

We play against Connecticut College today. They were a funny team last year who beat Final 4 team Ithaca, lost to Whittier by one and played us very tough, 13-9. However, they only won 2 games all year! Their entire offense is back and they are skilled and good finishers, not particularly athletic or strong at dodging. They always play a smart, controlled game against us on offense. We do not know much about them defensively as they have not been tested yet and they lost 3 long sticks and an excellent goalie. Their best defender was a legit, pre-season All American choice, apparently he is playing on a bad knee and has been somewhat limited. We're still not too interested in testing him. We may attempt to match him up against one of our fast attackman and see if he can run and change direction. Their goalie is young and untested as well, I am hoping we will not be able to say he is untested after today!!

We depart for spring trip tomorrow. A couple of days in the DC/Baltimore area practicing and then to Gettysburg Wednesday and up to CT for some practices before playing Wesleyan a week from Saturday. I am not certain what kind of access I will have to computers over the next week, I may or may not bring my lap top. So, I apologize in advance if I don't get write ups to you in a timely fashion.