Shifting from a close, aggressive playing style against Liverpool to a dominant one against Deerfield came naturally for Andover Girls Lacrosse. The team won both games 15-14 and 15-6. Its record now stands at 4-2.
After falling behind in the first half due to a slow start, the team provided an impressive comeback, stealing a late winner in the dying moments of the game.
“Against Liverpool, we had to come from behind. We were down 3-8 at the half!… [Liverpool] tied it up, then we went ahead by 1, then they tied it again at 14-14 with 1.26 to go in the game. We came up with the draw control and scored the game-winner with 51 seconds to go in the game! So, that was a very exciting come from behind win,” wrote Head Coach Heidi Wall in an email to The Phillipian.
After a tight game against Liverpool, Andover provided a comfortable victory over Deerfield. Led by its strong defensive performance, Andover was able to created many opportunities going forward due to causing many turnovers in the defensive third.
Against Deerfield today, we took control of the game from the start going up 3-0 in the first 16 minutes. We exchanged a few, but handily went into the half up 8-2. Deerfield played a very athletic game- coming up with several interceptions against us. But we were tough on defense and were able to defend well to cause turnovers ourselves. Our focus in this game was playing as a team and we did a nice job of stepping up and supporting each other on the field- 8 of our goals were assisted and we had goals from 7 different players,” wrote Head Coach Wall.
According to Audrey Powers ’24 and Emily Smith ’22, the team was propelled by the energy from the sidelines. Everyone contributed to the win; it was not just one individual dominating the field.
Powers said, “I think we really play well together as a team, especially [when] we’re picking and coming off of each other. There weren’t any individual players on the field. We all played off of each other.”
Smith added, “It wasn’t one person scoring, we had a lot of different people scoring during the game. So it was just more of a burst of energy kind of thing. There was a spark and it kind of went from there. There’s just a lot of energy on the sidelines.”
According to Smith and Wall, the team needs to work on staying focused and limiting unforced errors.
Smith said, “I think our biggest thing is usually just sometimes bouncing back from certain things, or usually, we’ll be close and then it’ll be four fouls in a row. Sometimes we have trouble keeping the ball for long periods of time or forcing passes. So [we have to] be a lot more controlled on the offensive side.”
Head Coach Wall wrote, “Going into Dexter Southfield we’d like to work on cutting down on our unforced errors. In addition, we want to continue to practice our settled attack and continue to work as a unit on defense.”
Andover Girls Lacrosse’s next game will be at home on Friday against Dexter Southfield.
