W. Lax starts season with W&M; scrimmages

Ask any member of the Penn women's lacrosse team how she felt when first taking the field against Old Dominion on Saturday and she will give you the same answer -- nervous. The game was just a scrimmage -- the first of 11 the Quakers would play over the weekend at the College of William and Mary -- so it had no bearing on records or statistics. Still, there was plenty riding on the 25 minutes of competition. It was Penn's first game under new coach Karin Brower, and the team's first chance to turn things around after last season's disappointing 1-12 performance. "I think that going out there everyone was a little nervous that we weren't going to play well and that our confidence would be shot," Penn senior tri-captain Brooke Jenkins said. Penn's first-year coach made her debut at her alma mater, the College of William and Mary -- the place where she earned All-America status as a player just eight years ago. "I think she was a little nostalgic. She would be like, 'Oh, this is this and that is that' and she would just go off a little bit," junior goalkeeper Christian Stover said. "It was kind of cool to see things from her perspective since she went to school there and coached there for a little bit." But the Quakers got over their butterflies quickly and defeated Old Dominion, as well as their next opponent, Richmond. Penn's upperclassmen had not achieved back-to-back wins since 1998, with last year's team claiming just one victory against Columbia. Of course, Penn did not look much like last year's squad, with 13 freshmen wearing the Red and Blue and a new coach pacing the sidelines. Jenkins said Brower's style differed from former coach Anne Sage's in several respects. "In the past, we had no coaching on attack," Jenkins said. "[Sage] would just be like, 'Go down there and set up whatever you want,' but [Brower] tells us, 'I want you to run this, this and this,' so it's more structured -- which is good." Brower mostly played her starters in the first two contests, but by the third game against Shippensburg, every member of the Quakers was getting into the action. In fact, Brower put out freshmen-only teams for several of the scrimmages. "They really didn't play timid," Stover said. "Maybe in the first couple minutes of the first scrimmage they did, but then they came out completely dominat[ing] over people who have had more experience then they've had." One freshman really made a name for herself -- literally. Crissy Book from Coatesville, Pa., defended her opponent so closely that Penn's assistant coach Amy Sullivan started calling her 'the White Shadow.' "I guess [the White Shadow] is a cartoon or something," Penn senior tri-captain Lee Ann Sechovicz said. "[Book] would come out of nowhere and get the ball away from her player every single time. She'd either intercept it or take it away from her." Brower described Book as deceivingly fast and very composed with the ball. Judging by Sechovicz's reaction to the freshman's play, Book just might have deceived her own teammates before last weekend's showing. "She'd started to come out in practice, but we never saw her full-force like that before," Sechovicz said. Jenkins' performance was another promising sign for Penn. The senior, who tore her ACL playing field hockey last season, said that her knees held up throughout the whole weekend of competition. "She had a little problem mobility-wise defending the clear, but she knows where to go, and she came up with a lot of balls just from being in the correct position," Brower said. With such a young squad, Jenkins' on-field presence will be crucial in leading the Quakers attack this season. "The upperclassmen have been here, so they know how to push us along," freshman Kate Murray said. "Offensively, I look up to [Jenkins] because she knows a lot about college-level play." Brower said that even though the Quakers successes were "off the record" last weekend -- from the initial wins to the final victory over Division III powerhouse The College of New Jersey -- there was still much to gain from the scrimmages. "I think the best thing is that they came back with a little bit of confidence. They came back believing that all of the hard work they've been doing is going to pay off eventually," Brower said. "That was really positive. I think they feel they're ready to take on their first game." The Quakers' season officially begins on March 14 when they face American University in Washington, D.C.

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