As Becca Edwards walked off Franklin Field last night, she was greeted with a cardboard sign that read "Show them who's boss."
Can't say she didn't listen.
Edwards scored three goals to lead No. 16 Penn to a cathartic and surprisingly easy 13-6 romp over Delaware.
Chrissy Muller added three goals and an assist for Penn, which rebounded nicely from its first loss of the season, a 13-4 drubbing by Northwestern on Friday.
"We have been saying, basically since last year, that we couldn't wait for this game to come around." Edwards said. "And we were going to show them no mercy."
They certainly didn't on offense. The Quakers' attack ran circles around Delaware's defense, allowing Penn to get open looks close to goal. Eight of Penn's 13 goals came without an assist.
On defense, Penn picked Delaware's pocket at midfield to help win the possession war. Penn also won 13 draw controls to Delaware's five.
Muller and Rachel Manson also scored within 10 seconds of each other to open the scoring.
Sarah Waxman played the entire game in goal and needed only six saves to keep the Blue Hens at bay. Delaware scored the final four goals of the game, but that wasn't what concerned the Quakers.
Penn had two scary moments. With 6:52 left in the first half, Debbie Sloan scored one of her two goals for Delaware, bringing the Blue Hens within one. Then, with 14:16 to play, Penn's Bethany Warren went down in a heap at midfield, but returned to the sidelines with her teammates. Yet in between, Penn had ten reasons to smile.
The Quakers scored ten unanswered goals to put the game away. Edwards started and ended the spurt, which lasted for over a half hour and silenced the healthy Blue Hens contingent in the stands.
"Our defense played great, held them to one goal for most of the game," Edwards said.
Penn won the ground ball war by a 19-14 margin and took 29 shots to the Blue Hens' 15.
Only Sloan scored more than once for the Blue Hens, who tallied just one assist on the day.
With the win, the Quakers enter their first Ivy matchup - at home against No. 18 Yale on Saturday - with a surplus of momentum.
"I know that we're a strong team, I feel that we are a stronger team than them," Penn coach Karin Brower said. "It should have been like this last year, I think, we just had an off day."
But the only way to prove that to Delaware, and to themselves, was to run up the score.
"We wanted to crush them," Edwards said.
Mission accomplished.
