In home opener, W. Lax shows its improvement

The Quakers took care of a Lafayette squad that last season beat them by seven. Before its game against Lafayette even started last night, the Penn women's lacrosse team already had a score to settle. The Leopards' head coach Jill Johnson-Redfern told Penn coach Karin Brower during warm-ups that she had heard the Quakers were "the same team as last year, but with a better attitude." When the final buzzer sounded, however, it was clear that more than just a better attitude separates this year's team from last year's 1-12 squad. The Quakers (3-2) defeated Lafayette (0-3), 11-8, in their first home game of the season. "I think we probably shocked them a little bit," Brower said. "I don't think they expected us to pressure them as much as we did and be as fast as we were, so that we could keep up with them." Kellee Salber struck first for the Leopards just two minutes into the contest. The senior's straight run to the goal looked effortless, prompting someone in the stands to scream out that it should be a "wake-up call" to the Quakers. Penn hit the collective snooze button for a few more minutes before Whitney Horton and Amy Weinstein responded with back-to-back goals just 25 seconds apart. Lafayette's Heather McClelland countered, but the Quakers tallied another four goals -- including three by senior captain Brooke Jenkins -- to take a 6-2 lead into the locker room at the intermission. After trailing by as many as four goals, the Leopards pulled within one to bring the score to 9-8 with four minutes remaining. But Penn shut the door on Lafayette as Jayme Munnelly and Traci Marabella scored in the closing minutes to end the game, 11-8. "We closed the gap, and we got close. But we could never get close enough. Penn was tough because they kept coming back, and they responded to every challenge that we gave them," Johnson-Redfern said. With 13 freshmen wearing the Red and Blue, Penn's personnel alone should have looked different to Johnson-Redfern when comparing the team to last year's. But while she might have missed these new faces during warm-ups, they were hard to ignore once the game began. The young Quakers accounted for six of Penn's 11 goals -- two each by Munnelly and Horton and one by both Alison Polk-Williams and Crissy Book. Penn's freshmen made their presence known on defense, too. "Christy Bennett did a great job on their big gun [Heather McClelland]," Brower said. "When I saw [Lafayette] play, she was definitely their go-to girl, and [Bennett] didn't allow her to challenge. As a freshman, I was really proud of her." Marabella said her team has not just changed since last year -- it has changed since last week. That is good news for the Quakers, since their last contest was a 15-5 loss to Cornell on the road. "I think we were really pissed off about Cornell, and we wanted to show that we are so much better than that," Marabella said. "It sounds really dumb because we got crushed by Cornell, but we really could have beaten them. We just lost our heads." This decapitation resulted in frenetic play against the Big Red such that the Quakers rarely executed their offensive sets. Fortunately for the Quakers, Penn had a few practice days to consider the error of its ways before taking the field against Lafayette last night. "We had some intense practices where we analyzed the game," Munnelly said. "We're really good at breaking down what we did wrong, correcting it and then moving on rather than dwelling on it." Brower definitely noticed a few corrections on her team's part. "They were much more aggressive, and they wanted it more [than Saturday]. They double-teamed the ball, went after ground balls, didn't get beaten to the balls, made smarter decisions on attack, ran through the plays, spread out more and worked as a team," she said. And that was just the offense. "Defensively, we did a better job at keeping them out and dropping -- not letting an open kid be there as much," Brower said. "We didn't communicate really well on Saturday. "To be honest, I think Cornell was a good loss for us because they needed to step it up and push themselves harder."

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