In the battle for Pennsylvania state pride, the Penn women's lacrosse team hung with Penn State for one half yesterday, but in the end the No. 8 Nittany Lions pulled away, posting a dominant 16-9 victory over the Quakers.
Played in State College, Pa., the game became a tale of two halves. The 15th-ranked Quakers (5-4, 2-1 Ivy) got on the board when Emily Cochran put in a goal at the 20:54 mark. The Red and Blue would then stake a 2-1 lead when Ali Ryan, who assisted on Cochran's goal, notched one of her own under a minute later.
All seemed to be running smoothly for Penn when, with just five minutes remaining in the period, the team held a 5-3 advantage. Penn State would counter, however, scoring four unanswered goals in the final five minutes of the half.
Even after this minor meltdown, the Quakers headed into the break behind by just two goals, still a respectable position against a very potent Penn State squad.
"The first half was pretty exciting, it was sort of back and forth, and we went up 5-3," Penn coach Karin Brower said.
"Then they came back and it ended up being 7-5 going into half. They had a couple fast-break goals."
The Quakers appeared to have righted the ship at the outset of the second half when Ryan put in the first goal of the frame off of a free position.
However, what Penn State had begun at the end of the first period, they soon resumed in the second. The Nittany Lions scored four out of the game's last six goals to send the Quakers packing.
The question to think about after the game for the Quakers was how a respectable 7-5 deficit in the first half turned into the eventual 16-9 drubbing by the end of the game.
Brower attributed the changing of the tide to a lack of focus on the Quakers' part and to a lack of fundamentals.
"The second half was really disappointing," Brower said. "We're struggling on a lot of the same things, like our ground balls and our basic catching and throwing skills. We weren't coming up with the draw, and we were turning the ball over in transition and it was hurting us."
Still, it is difficult to imagine that the turnaround could have rested solely on anything the Quakers did -- or failed to do, in this case. The Nittany Lions pounced at the right time and took advantage of Penn's mistakes, while another, less experienced team may have allowed the game to continue on its earlier course.
"I think that Penn State's a good team, and when you make some mistakes, they're going to make you pay for it," Brower said. "Credit to Penn State; they play hard, they're good athletes, and they're fast.
"But I also think that we didn't take care of the ball, which opened up a lot of opportunities-more opportunities than they should have had."
Turnovers, indeed, were the story yesterday. The Quakers had 16 of them, to the Lions' nine. Penn trailed in all of the other statistical categories as well, being out-shot 33-20, out-hustled with 22 of the 39 ground balls going the Lions' way and out-drawn with a 14-13 deficit in face-offs won.
Saturday, the Red and Blue will be back in action at Harvard. The Crimson lost to Boston University 11-9 yesterday, dropping its sixth in a row to fall to 2-6 on the year.
After Harvard, the Quakers will take on perennial powerhouse Princeton on Wednesday, before finishing the home season next Saturday against Dartmouth.
Then Penn faces Loyola (Md.), Brown and Rutgers on the road to finish the season.
In order to finish the year on a high note, Brower knows the Quakers will need turnarounds in all of these categories. She anticipates plenty of work on fundamentals during practice, but knows part of that is up to the players themselves.
"To be honest, it has a lot to do with individual skills," Brower said. "It has a lot to do with the basic skills of lacrosse: the catching and the throwing, and the ground balls. Those are things that have to come from within them. And they're Division-I athletes, they need to be beyond these mistakes that they're making."
If Penn can survive its own worst enemy thus far -- itself --then it should be fine.
