Scarlet Knights slay 1-9 W. Lax at Franklin Field

Traci Marabella and Amy Weinstein scored the Quakers' only goals. The Penn women's lacrosse team came into last night's game against No. 11 Rutgers knowing it would need to turn in a near-perfect performance to notch its second win of the season. The Quakers' actual play, however, fell far short of that standard, and the Scarlet Knights left Philadelphia with a 15-3 triumph. "It was just a breakdown on every single part of the field," Penn senior co-captain Jenni Leisman said. "It's really frustrating." The Quakers (1-9) are now just one loss away from tying the team record for losses in a season, originally set in 1986 and matched in 1991 and 1992. Of Penn's final three opponents, two are ranked -- the season's final opponent, Brown, had been ranked also until being replaced by upstart Cornell in this week's IWLCA poll. "We have to go back to the drawing board," said Penn assistant coach Alanna Wren, who has been leading the Quakers for nearly a month and a half since the team petitioned for the removal of head coach Anne Sage. "We have to go back to getting the players to understand what the game plan is gonna be and then having them implement that game plan, and not just freelancing, hoping that it's gonna work." Against the Scarlet Knights, very little worked for the Quakers, especially on defense, as 10 Rutgers players put the ball in the cage, led by sophomore Jill Penrose's hat trick. "I think our team is very unselfish," Rutgers coach Anna Marie Vesco said. "That's the way we like it, having six or seven scorers instead of one or two." While the Quakers had seven players score at Columbia in the season's lone win, only two players -- Traci Marabella and Amy Weinstein -- could add tallies to the board last night. Marabella's goal came 2:42 into the game, tying the score at one. At that point, it seemed like the Quakers had a shot at pulling off the upset, but the momentum was short-lived. "We got the ball down in our attacking end and that was a big positive because we usually have trouble doing that early in the game," Wren said. "But it was just that one goal, and we spent a lot of time in our defensive end after that and they just scored goal after goal and our defense couldn't get it together." In fact, Rutgers would score nine times before Penn could add to its total again. After Marabella bounced a free position shot past the net, the ball cycled to Weinstein, who scored the first of her two goals with 24:58 to play in the game. Unfortunately for Penn, the game was already out of reach. Weinstein herself found little solace in the fact that she scored two goals in the game, disappointed by both the outcome and her own performance. "I don't think that's really reflective of how I played," the sophomore said. "We just need to realize that in games like this we don't really have anything to lose, so we should go out and give it all that we have because nothing bad can happen if you give it your all." It also did not help the Quakers that Rutgers answered the early game-tying goal within 18 seconds to advance their lead to the margin that would stand for the rest of the night. "We had practiced how to defend them and what we were supposed to do," Leisman said. "We didn't do it and they started scoring, and that got everyone down, and then there were midfield transition problems again, and the attack wasn't working right." On a night where nothing worked right for Penn at Franklin Field, everything was going as planned for the Scarlet Knights, who won their sixth straight. "We were flat for the first couple of minutes," Vesco said. "I think we just started building momentum after that. We started connecting a couple of passes and our flow got going a little better." With three more tough games left to play, the Quakers can only hope to find some flow of their own.

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