F. Hockey 'not Penn State' as Lions feast

The Quakers played tough defense in the first half before crumbling against No. 4 Penn State. Wednesday night at Bigler Field, two teams -- the Quakers and the Nittany Lions -- fought for intrastate bragging rights in field hockey. In a decisive Penn State victory, the teams played true to their nicknames as the fierce Lions obliterated the passive Quakers. Penn State (15-3) racked up eight goals in a shutout win. "It's not as bad as 8-0 sounds," Penn assistant coach Donna Mulhern said. Giving up eight goals cannot be comforting to a field hockey team; however, the final score does not paint an accurate picture of the entire game. Penn (3-11), a winless team in the Ivy League, obviously was the underdog going up against the No. 4 team in the nation. Nonetheless, they kept the Lions under control in the first half. Twenty minutes into the game, the score was still knotted at 0-0. It was not until Penn State's Tracey Larson, scored with 15:04 remaining in the half that Penn State took its first lead. The Nittany Lions then continued to dominate possession for the rest of the half but the Quakers held their ground and did not let another goal in the cage until just before halftime. Penn State's Kiley Kulina scored the first of her two goals to give the Nittany Lions a 2-0 lead at halftime. "Granted, [Penn State] was in our end the whole time but we were doing a good job of not giving them easy chances," Mulhern said. Perhaps the Red and Blue's defense burned out after playing practically 35 straight minutes of defense in the first half. Whatever the reason, from the get-go of the second half Penn State was hungry for goals. And the Quakers were helpless to suppress the Lions' vicious thirst for finding the cage. The second time around the Lions did not wait 20 minutes to open the scoring. Penn State was not on the field for more than five minutes when Larson struck again. Her second goal was quickly followed by a third and finally a fourth when she netted the final shot of the game with 12:37 remaining. Penn State continued the onslaught as Kulina scored again at 27:59, Robinson at 27:22 and Maegan Galie added one at 16:14. Larson then tallied the last two goals of her final home game. As Penn coach Val Cloud put it, "The dam burst," she said. Once it burst, five minutes into the second half, there was no way the Quakers could control it. Penn senior co-captain Leah Bills managed to put one shot on goal but that was the sole attempt for the Quakers. Penn State totaled 21 shots on cage. Perhaps the root of the Penn's tribulations rests in the historical origins of our school's mascot, the not-so-ferocious Quaker. However, the more probable place to trace the sources of the Red and Blue's current misfortune most likely started in the beginning of the season. Beginning with Courtney Martin breaking her hand in the season opener at St. Joe's, a string of injuries has hit the team. The most serious of these injuries was a season-ending torn ACL to senior defender Brooke Jenkins. The most recent blow in this unfortunate series of injuries occurred against the Nittany Lions when senior co-captain Maureen Flynn jumped in the cage to deflect a shot. Flynn made contact with the ball, but the ball split her finger and the goal counted. "There has been a calamity of injuries and situations," Cloud said. "We're hanging in there though." The Quakers have little to no choice but to hang in there with just three games left on the schedule. Tomorrow, the Quakers will face their final Ivy opponent of the season, Yale, which has just one Ivy League win. "Yale is a real must for us, we don't want to be the only ones at the bottom," Cloud said. "It is a possible win." To get that possible win, Penn must stop playing like passive Quakers and start eating the Elis alive.