Saturday 4/25 – Andover: 5, Deerfield: 13
Wednesday 4/29 – Andover: 3, New Hampton: 6
Boys Lacrosse (6–4) fell to Deerfield last Saturday and New Hampton this Wednesday, extending its losing streak to four games. Despite a robust defense, the team has struggled offensively to generate consistent opportunities to make goals.
Coming off losses to Choate and Holderness the previous week, Boys Lacrosse faced strong competition from Deerfield. Attacker Brayden Ko ’28 commented on the team’s adaptability amid injuries and successes in defensive efforts during the game.
“We obviously knew that Deerfield was a good opponent, a tough one. They had a lot of talent on their team, [and] they have lots of depth in their team. They were well coached. It was going to be especially hard because we had a lot of injuries on our team. We were missing two starting defensemen, so we made a lot of adjustments, like running the defense with the personnel that we had and the preparation that at the time that we had. We did a decent job of keeping the score down as much as possible,” said Ko.
Ko continued, “Our goalie Michael Attubato ’28 had a lot of good saves. It was definitely in the double digits, but he had a lot of saves that kept us in the game and kept the score where it was. I shout out the entire defense.”
On Wednesday, Boys Lacrosse hosted New Hampton. Despite a strong start, with the defense allowing only six goals, the offense came up short, scoring only three goals. Attacker Luke Honos ’28 reflected on the game’s early momentum.
“It was tied at the first quarter. We used new defense that worked well, and our goalie Michael made a lot of good saves. He kept us in the game, and our offense was struggling to score. But overall, we played hard,” said Honos.
Midfielder Ben Kazlouski ’28 identified declining confidence and fundamentals as challenges Boys Lacrosse has recently faced, and outlined the team’s focus areas for improvement heading into the final stretch of the season.
“Our biggest challenge was definitely just our confidence levels, a little bit, especially on the offensive side. Maybe we’re tired. It’s the middle of the week, or maybe Head of School Day had something to do with it, but we weren’t connecting on our passes, and we were trying to force them in the middle to try and get a quick shot off. But it just didn’t work, because the guy in the middle was always covered. [New Hampton was] a really talented team, too. You can’t take away any of their credit, but we were in our heads offensively. It was a super winnable game, but we were playing down to them a little bit instead of them playing up to beat us. We need to work on some of our transition stick work,” said Kazlouski.
He continued, “We need to get back into our mojo. Our offenses, we started off really strong at the beginning of the season, but the fundamentals that we were building on our offense on started collapsing. Offensively, we need to keep our spacing and dodge quicker. We’re taking too long to try and set it up. We need to just go, go, go. Offensively and defensively, we had trouble clearing because we were dropping passes. On the defensive side, we’ve made huge improvements compared to the prior games, especially with our new defensive scheme that we’ve been running. We could have made it so they only scored four, if we just paid a little more attention to our man while they were while they’re moving around. We got caught watching the ball a little bit.”
Boys Lacrosse will face Loomis Chaffee (Loomis) on Saturday and St. Paul’s next Wednesday.
