Rines Put a Whoopin' on Wheaton

Watkins Mill field hockey added another notch in the win column of their breakout season, overwhelming a winless Wheaton squad 7-0 on Wednesday.

Senior co-captain Daniela DeLeon got the scoring started two minutes in, then capped off the afternoon with a shot from long range—her first two goals of the season.

Two other goals came from Emily Sperling, who played for the first time since taking a hard fall against Damascus on Sept. 19. Wednesday’s tallies give her a team-high six goals this season.

Sara Jane Campbell, Jordan Stephenson and Alexis Rusnak rounded out Wednesday’s scoring.

The Lady ‘Rines now stand at 6-1-1, their best record this deep into any of the seven years Coach Michelle Pettit has led the program. Only undefeated Westminster sits ahead of Watkins Mill in the 3A West.

After the surprising start, the team has gone through an up-and-down two weeks that brought them their first loss.

They were blanked 5-0 by undefeated Poolesville on Sept. 26—a performance in which Watkins Mill was able to hold the high-powered Falcons scoreless for the first 29 minutes.

“We played a solid game,” Pettit said. “We mentally broke down for a few minutes, and a team like Poolesville capitalizes on that pretty quickly. We’re going to encounter teams that are better than us—and they were better than us—but I’m really proud of the way we played against them.”

That loss was followed by a 5-0 shutout of Seneca Valley the next day—an untidy win, Petit said, where her team’s vast improvement didn’t show as much as she would have liked.

Wednesday against Wheaton, those skills start to shine back through.

“Today, we brought them back, and I need to figure out how to keep them from breaking down,” Pettit said.

Watkins Mill has four games before the playoffs: at Kennedy Oct. 11, at Churchill Oct. 13, hosting Rockville Oct. 14, and against Magruder Oct. 20 in Wolverine Stadium for Senior Night.