Licking their wounds

It's rare to have to face the number-one team in the country, but it's even rarer to let up 20 goals -- in this case a 20-5 beating from No 1 Cornell.

However, two years ago the 2-11 men's lacrosse team did get walloped by an equal margin, 21-6, at the hands of Maryland. Other than that, Penn hasn't allowed more than 16 goals in the last four years (or as far back as the record books go).

The thing is, Terps game was the season finale in 2005: this year's team must rebound from the 20-goal shellacking. There are two approaches to turning around after a bad loss -- either talking about it and using it as motivation, or just forgetting about it and coming out strong the next weekend.

While the Quakers want to put the loss behind them, they have taken the former route. The Red and Blue had a meeting on Monday to break down game film, saw what they did wrong and are now fired up to be the aggressor this time.

"I think it's definitely motivating looking at [the box score] and seeing how bad we actually played in that game," senior middie David Cornbrooks said. "We can take that and use it, and maybe do that to a team on Friday."

While I didn't make the trip up to Cornell for the Ivy matchup, from reading recaps and taking a look at the boxscore it seems as if the Big Red just plain bullied the Quakers.

Cornell held Penn to only 14 shots on goal (half of what it got off), and out-muscled Penn for 14 more ground balls. As a result, the Big Red took nine penalties for a whopping 7:00 of power plays. Meanwhile, the Quakers sat in the box for 2:30, right on their season average.

They did score two goals while a man up, but that wasn't nearly enough, as the more physical Cornell squad coasted to a victory in the second half.

Clearly the negatives of taking penalties didn't come close to outweighing the positives. As a team which draws over a minute more in penalties than it commits, all Penn needs is for the NCAA to NHL-ise lacrosse, so that the Broad Street Bullies no longer rule the league.