Girls' Lax Beats Rain, Walpole to Advance to D-1 Semi

A brief thundershower Saturday only delayed what the Walpole girls' lacrosse team could not prevent—an 8-2 Wellesley victory that advanced the third-seeded Raiders to a Division 1 South semifinal, in which they will either visit No. 2 Franklin or host No. 7 Notre Dame.

Wellesley (18-1-2) got two goals apiece from Abby Bunting, Mary Louise Dixon and Blake Dietrick and shut out Walpole, after a storm suspended play for 55 minutes with the game tied, 2-2, and 5:37 remaining in the first half.

"I think the rain helped us a little bit," said sophomore attacker Molly McNamara, who potted what proved to be the game-winning goal moments after play resumed. "I think the fact that the game was tied and we realized it could go either way kind of freaked us out."

"We said, 'There's no way this is our last game; we are not going home,'" added Dietrick, an all-American and already the program's all-time leading scorer, as a junior. "We came back with renewed motivation and renewed energy."

The Rebels (16-6) struck first, just a minute into the contest, when crisp ball movement by a trio of seniors produced a Shelby Guisti goal. Michaela Brady, working the circumference of the 12-meter fan, fed Kristen Morrissey, who one-timed a pass to Guisti, posting up Wellesley keeper Megan McNamara like a basketball center. Guisti spun and beat McNamara over the left shoulder for a 1-0 Rebel advantage.

But about 10 minutes later, after the seemingly omnipresent Bunting knotted the game, the Raiders claimed their first lead on a sweeping score by Dixon. Dietrick had just been fouled in front of the Walpole net and presented a close-range free position, which the Rebels' Alicia Tosone disrupted via a super-hustle stick check. The ball trickled out of bounds behind the goal but remained Wellesley's possession.

Then Dixon, after receiving the inbounds pass from Caroline Drury, rocked Tosone to sleep before darting past her, crossing the net from left to right and splitting Walpole's Anne Valle and Midge Daniel, whose help defense arrived too late to stop Dixon's shot from eluding goalie Kayla Cullen on her stick side.

But Walpole's Kim Walsh soon retied the game, curling behind the cage and firing a far-side twine-seeker, and the Raiders—with eight seniors recovering from the school's all-night graduation party—looked like a groggy bunch of girls getting all they could handle from the tourney's No. 6 seed.

Maybe the rain woke them up.

Molly McNamara had been fouled about 15 meters from the Walpole goal and was about to take her free position when officials waved both squads off the field because of lightning in the area. The microburst gave the younger McNamara almost an hour to plot her upcoming move.

"We talked about it during the delay, and I was going to flip to Blake," she explained. "But we saw Walpole had the left hash, [where Dietrick stood], covered."

So, instead, the underclassman took charge, blitzing the cage and firing a five-hole bouncer that beat Cullen.

"It was definitely improvisation," McNamara said, bashfully.

Her score was the first of a three-goal flurry to close the half. With 1:40 remaining in the period, Bunting beamed a centering pass to Drury at the top of the eight-meter arc. Her defense out of position, Cullen attempted to smother the ball before it could escape Drury's crosse, but the senior coolly deposited it over the goalie's head, pushing her team's lead to 4-2.

Just 36 seconds later, Bunting found herself on the other end of a virtually identical play, this pass coming from Dietrick, and it was 5-2, Wellesley, at intermission, the Raiders generating offense without a tally by their No. 1 option.

"If they double-team me, it obviously means someone else is open," Dietrick reasoned. "I just had to find my teammates, and they were finishing."

Almost the entirety of the second-half action occurred on Walpole's side of the field. Megan McNamara was tested rarely, and when the Rebels went BP in their effort to contain Dietrick—she scored the game's final two goals, including an unassisted dazzler with 1:29 on the clock—it was clear the Raiders would move on to the next round.

Head coach Chris Molonea won't overlook Wellesley's semifinal opponent but conceded her team would relish a rematch with unbeaten Westwood—the only foe to earn a win against the Raiders this spring—in the championship.

"Losing to them wasn't the worst thing that could have happened," Molonea said, referring to the 15-14 defeat in the regular-season finale May 25. "It provides some extra motivation to keep working hard."

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