Middlebury defeated Trinity 13-8 at Trinity this past Saturday.  It was a
beautiful, sunny spring day with a good crowd.  Trinity has been playing
well recently.  They are young so they lost a few early, but had beaten
Williams and Amherst and lost by one to undefeated Wesleyan on Wednesday.
They are athletic and play hard so it was a fun contest. 

The tale of the tape was solid play and too much balance on offense.  Dave
Seeley was 4/2 and the rest of the scoring was balanced with a goal or two
being scored by a number of players.  The defense played solid all day, the
score was not as close as 13-8.  After 3 the score was 9-4 and I believe it
got all the way to 13-4 before we subbed.  Our subs were in the tough
position of playing cold off the bench against Trinity's starters who stayed
in the game.

One development which was nice in the game was a few of our transition
offensive opportunities.  We have three great defensive midfielders, John
Rice, Bryan Sanchez and Greg Bastis (frosh).  They all have wheels and we
feel that we can utilize them in transition better than we have.  Sanchez
and Bastis in particular are excellent offensive threats.  Bastis had 2
goals and one assist, one of his goals came on a coast-to-coast run which
ended in a cannon of a right hand shot that definitely got the Middlebury
bench, crowd and coaches on their feet.

Another impact player in the game was Scott Goldman who has been improving
each game at long stick midfield.  He has been great on the wing on face
offs, where we have improved dramatically.  Brian McGregor takes the
majority of our face offs with Goldman as the long stick and either Rice,
Bastis or Sanchez on the wing.  Goldman played great on ball defense as
well, pinwheeling the stick out of a middies hand at one point!

If there was a place to improve it would be that we went backwards during a
couple periods with decision making on the offensive end.  Trinity was a
good ball possession team and there were a couple periods in the game during
which they were possessing the ball well and then we would go down and turn
the ball over quickly without a quality possession.  We had made some great
strides in this area, so that was a little disappointing.  If we had been
closer to 100% we might have blown them out.  Oh well, it gives us something
to work on!

Wednesday we are at Williams.  They are struggling with only 2 wins, but
they are still Williams so we will expect the best out of them and also
bring our best regardless of what Williams team shows up.  The winner of the
game keeps the Thomsen Trophy for the year (given by Jeff's grandfather when
Jeff was at Middlebury and his brother, Peter, was at Williams) and we have
had the trophy at Midd since the early 90's.  We are not about to give it
back!

Erin