Millburn Boys Lax Advances in Counties

For the second straight game, the Millburn boys lacrosse defense asserted its will in the second half. The Millers allowed just two goals in the final 30 minutes of play on Saturday, and defeated the Columbia Cougars, 8-5, in the opening round of the Essex County Tournament at Dr. Keith A. Neigel Field in Millburn.

Entering the second half, the score was 5-3 Millburn, and it was anyone’s game. But Millburn controlled possession in the second half, winning the groundball battle 21-14 and out-shooting the visitors 11-9; only four of Columbia’s nine shots were on goal.

“The good thing about playing today is that we just saw them on Thursday, so we made adjustments,” said Millburn head coach Bill McCutcheon. “We had different match-ups we wanted to stick with. They’re a good team, this was just a hard game because of sloppy weather - we were dropping the ball, they were dropping the ball.”

Millburn stretched its two goal lead in the third quarter, getting a pair of scores from Mark Funk. The first came on a wrist shot from about 15 yards out and the second came on a man-up opportunity, putting the Millers ahead 7-3 with 5:29 left in the third. Millburn never looked back.

After being shutout in the third quarter, Columbia’s Dylan Henningburg took a long pass, cleared from the other half of the field (called a Gilman) and found an opening to bring the Cougars within three goals with 9:16 remaining.

“I thought we actually played a pretty good game today,” said Columbia head coach Dean Witty. “One of the things we did say to these kids was that you have to play with a chip on your shoulder. You have to be angrier than you play. We were a little bit too passive sometimes.”

The score remained 7-4 until with 1:28 left with the Millers trying to bleed some clock, Tyler Alexander scooped a groundball near the out-of-bounds line behind the net, cut across the front of the goal and found a wide-open Ben Cebula just outside of the crease for the easy score. With Millburn up by four with less than two minutes to play, the game was effectively over.

“Our intensity was one of the biggest things that hurt us today,” Witty said. “We don’t have an urgency to possess the ball sometimes or we have too much urgency to go to the goal and we should be probably holding it.”

Henningburg added his third score of the game with 30.9 seconds remaining, but the score was merely cosmetic, with the game well out of reach.

“We said before the game that we wanted to hold them to five goals,” McCutcheon said. “We held them to five and the rest is history as far as that’s concerned. It just comes down to the mental toughness and trying to dominate your match-up. When we played six-on-six, we played great. The goals that they scored were in transition.”

One of the stories of the game for Millburn was the play of its keeper, Matthew Berns. The Miller net-minder had a rough go of things in Maplewood against Columbia on Thursday, allowing seven first half goals and 10 overall. But On Saturday, he was outstanding, stopping 14 shots, 11 in the first half and giving up five scores, the second fewest allowed this season.

“We worked with Berns all day in practice yesterday and today in the morning, he was in here early,” McCutcheon said. “He saw the ball better. This is his home field, he wants to protect his home turf. As far as the other game, the goalie is the toughest position to play on the field, so when he’s not hot, it’s tough to start saving the ball.”

The Cougars seemed to spend half of the game with players in the penalty box, constantly going a man down and having to play on the defensive as a result. However, their man down team played well, giving up just two goals in those situations.

Goals by Brian Baker, Funk, Ryan Bednarski, Mark Weinrauch and Max Nemenow put Millburn up 5-1 at the end of the first quarter. Devon Good scored Columbia’s only goal in that period. But Columbia’s defense stepped in the second quarter and shutout the home team. They got a breakaway goal from Brett Mangan and a score from Henningburg off of a pass from Austin Little to cut Millburn’s lead down to 5-3 with 24.4 seconds left in the half.

Millburn was led by Funk’s three goals in the contest, helping the Millers improve to 6-1 overall - their best start to a season since 2006, when the Millers began 5-0 and then 7-1, finishing with a 13-4 record. They face West Essex in the quarterfinals of the ECT next weekend and play again on Monday against St. Peter’s Prep.

“I’m ecstatic. I’m very happy, it’s their effort, it’s their energy that we need to carry on with this,” McCutcheon said. “We’re going to face a very good West Essex team next week and we just have to make sure that we stay composed first and get to work on Monday and do the little things.”

Columbia dropped to 2-6 overall and are in action again, also against St. Peter’s Prep, on Tuesday.

“We played hard,” Witty said. “We played hard and, again, Millburn is a good team. They’re 6-1, two of those on us, which I’m not happy about, but you know they’re a good team and they’re well coached, the coach is a good guy, so we just have to keep working hard.”