After losing its leading scorer for the season on Saturday and then losing a game it could have won against No. 12 Johns Hopkins on Tuesday, the Penn women's lacrosse team is facing a dangerous moment in its season.
Hosting Columbia (5-3, 0-2 Ivy) at Franklin Field tomorrow, the Quakers (5-4, 1-1) will be trying to avoid a second -half panic attack that cost them wins against Yale and Johns Hopkins in the last two weeks.
Penn coach Karin Brower feels that her team can no longer shrug off losses, but must instead take real lessons from them. Because of that, the Quakers watched about an hour of film yesterday before practice.
"You have to move forward with progress," Brower said. "And not just move forward past it."
The game against Hopkins "was our third game of not following the game plan, and it has to change," she added.
If the Red and Blue want to keep their Ivy League title hopes alive, they need to win tomorrow to get their season back on track.
However, with leading scorer Emily Cochran out for the remainder of the season with a torn anterior cruciate ligament, Penn is looking for other players to step up on offense.
One of them is freshman Chrissy Muller, who is second on the team with 13 goals and leads the Quakers with five assists.
"It's really important for us to win and prove that we can still do it without Emily," Muller said.
"I personally need to step it up, but as an offensive unit everyone needs to step up," she added.
Junior Katie Spofford, who has nine goals and three assists on the season, believes that the Quakers have finally understood how not to fold under pressure and just play their game. After constant repetition in practice, she thinks that "everyone feels comfortable" in the offense and that even if the Quakers fall behind, they "don't need to panic."
Brower says that Penn has to work on its attack "so that it's ingrained in them what they're supposed to do."
If they follow the strategy that worked in their wins and in the first halves against the Blue Jays and Elis, Brower is confident that the Red and Blue can come out on top.
"If we play our game plan and stick to the game plan, we have a really good shot at winning," Brower said.
The Quakers will also again be without junior co-captain Kate Miller on defense, who will be out for at least another week with a sprained ankle. She has missed the last two games.
Both Muller and Spofford echoed their coach's sentiment that the Quakers have come out confidently at first in their losses but lost that confidence as they fell behind stronger opponents and stopped running their game plan.
"We struggle with teams we haven't beaten before," Brower said.
Thankfully for the Quakers, they have beaten Columbia in each of their previous seven meetings, as the Lions have never won an Ivy League game in their six years of Ivy League play.
