Girls Lacrosse Gets Thunderstruck by Conestoga

NEWTOWN SQUARE–Thursday's girls' lacrosse game was about an hour away from being cancelled on account of thunderstorms, but the rain stopped around 2 p.m., and the girls took the field as scheduled.

Once the game started, it only took about a minute for another kind of downpour to begin.

At 23:54, Conestoga opened the scoring, and the goals just rained down. Their superb ball control, consistent positional play and crisp passing let Conestoga dictate play for most of the game, and made it easy to hit the open player right on the doorstep of the Tigers' goal time and again for easy scored. By 7:33 in the first half, Conestoga had taken a commanding 9-0 lead.

The Tigers finally broke the shutout when freshman attacker Lauren Ferguson dashed in on goal and scored with five minutes left in the half. Less than a minute later, Conestoga resumed their scoring, and again at 2:00.

Marple Newtown netted their second goal when Ferguson charged downfield, made a nice pass to the left for senior attacker Annabel Shin, who whipped it past the goalie. The half ended 11-2.

The first nine minutes of the second half was more of the same with Conestoga building up to a 14-2 lead before the Tigers struck back with two consecutive goals. The first was by Shin, her second of the night on a shifty, net-circling low dunk.

The next was by senior attacker/midfielder Devon Miller. Conestoga came back with a vengeance, piling up six more goals before the final horn, the last of which came with a gut-punching 1.6 seconds left.

With a final score of 20-4, Marple Newtown has to take a step back and figure out what went wrong.

Coach MaryAnn Schiller talked about her team's effort and possible areas of improvement after the game.

"We focused on ways we could slow the ball down in the midfield to allow time for us to recover on defense," she commented. "All season long we've recognized our need to possess the ball for longer periods of time, ways we can support the ball when we do have it in our possession and recovering on defense."

Schiller ended on a positive note, "I try hard to always believe that my team will come out to play with confidence and to play with effort. Despite the final result of today's game, I am pleased that we never gave up and played with great effort."