Brown's Mounsey does in Field Hockey

Tara Mounsey. Just call her the one-woman show. All four goals under the visitor's column on Franklin Field's scoreboard during Saturday morning's field hockey game were tallied by Mounsey, who led Brown to a 4-1 defeat of the Quakers. "[Mounsey] is a really strong player," Penn junior defender Lauren Cornew said. "We needed to deny her the ball because every time she got it she created something. We didn't do such a hot job of it." In fact, the junior tied her own school record for goals in a game. Mounsey, a neuroscience major from Concord, N.H., has also been named Ivy Player of the Week for the past two weeks. Impressively, in addition to that honor, she is also a standout defender on the Brown women's ice hockey team and was a member of the U.S. gold medal-winning team in the 1998 Olympics. But Mounsey's record number for goals tallied was not the only milestone the team reached this past weekend. The 14th-ranked Bears tied their school record for victories in a season with 11. But the fact that Brown (11-2, 5-0 Ivy League) has Mounsey on its roster did not guarantee an automatic championship team. Brown played a full 70 minutes of solid team field hockey to earn the victory. "They outplayed us and that's the bottom line," Penn coach Val Cloud said. "In order for us to have beaten [Brown] everything had to have gone right. Everybody had to have played well and the bounces had to have gone our way." The Quakers (3-10, 0-5) opened the game with an air of confidence about them and the bounces did seem to be going their way early on. Just 39 seconds in, senior Courtney Martin tallied her fifth goal of the season on an assist from senior co-captain Maureen Flynn. "Basically [the first goal by Penn] put us back on our heels a little bit," Brown coach Carolan Norris said. "But then it was the Tara Mounsey show. She's outstanding." With 19:01 remaining in the first half, Mounsey tied the game. Her second goal, on an assist from Kristen According, came just 55 seconds before halftime and gave Brown a 2-1 edge at the break from which Penn would never recover. "I thought the first half was played pretty even but they just took it to us after that," Cloud said. "We haven't been able to take charge of a game in the second half." In the beginning of the fall the Quakers struggled to put goals in the cage -- the Red and Blue tallied 10 goals in their first 10 games. But in the two games prior to Brown, against Temple and Bucknell, the Quakers made a concerted effort to shake this scoring impediment and tallied seven goals. Against Brown, however, the team reverted to its old ways and could not convert shots into goals. "When we got into the circle, we didn't capitalize on getting corners," freshman Kylee Jakobowski said. "We only got two corners and we should have gotten much more. We didn't use a lot of our little passes. We used the big ball all the time and we were passing to their sticks." The Bears held a 7-2 advantage in penalty corners and outshot the Quakers dramatically, 18-4. In addition, the Bears had two opportunities to score off penalty strokes but failed to convert these one-on-one situations with Penn's goalie into points on the scoreboard. Junior Alison Friedman and sophomore Gerrianne Kauffman combined to make 12 saves in net for the Quakers, while the Bears' Annie Owens had to make only three saves. To dominate the Red and Blue offensively, Brown kept the ball on the right side of the field. Although this tactic was also part of Penn's game plan, the Quakers couldn't "rise to the occasion," Cloud said. Brown's most obvious advantage over Penn was its speed and confidence. But it was the Quakers who started the game with that exact combination of speed and confidence. In pursuit of an upset, Penn opened the scoring, and as Martin got on the board less than a minute into the game, the team believed a surprise win could be in the headlines. Then something happened after Mounsey dribbled the ball right over the goal line with only 55 seconds remaining in the opening half. The initial winning attitude disappeared. "We scored first and then I don't know what happened," Cornew said. "When we come out and score first we need to continue taking it to them the entire game. We need to put 70 minutes of great hockey together."

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