Ground balls win championships. Youth coaches everywhere feel validated.

Our #2 Notre Dame Fighting Irish (13-3) lost to the #1 Princeton Tigers (17-2) in the finals by a score of 16 to 9. One wayward quarter of lacrosse ended the Irish season.

Splat

As Coach Corrigan has noted in the past, sometimes you are the windshield, sometimes you are the bug.

We will have a more in depth recap out soon, but here are our real-time reactions from the press box:

The boys came out the game hot, scoring 3 quick goals to take an early lead. Princeton called a timeout to regain themselves, and quickly responded to tie the game up. After that early stretch of goals, the offense felt a bit slow and had a hard time getting things going against their switch to zone. Granted, there weren’t many possessions.

The faceoff dot has struggled early which has allowed for some make-it-take-it ball from the Tigers. Defensively, another 2-minute locked in penalty kill is great and Corrigan made an amazing timeout save to help with that. Most importantly, the boys are getting killed on ground balls right now, down 3 to 18. This will need to be improved to win this game. 8 Ricciardelli saves are what is keeping the team alive right now.

I don’t even have words for the second. We can’t break a zone. We can’t win a match-up. We can’t slow them down. We can’t get a ground ball. This 25 minute scoring drought feels like an entire year. What else is there to say?

The third was better. The boys are fighting and that is all we can ask for. They are patient against the zone. A big fourth quarter will be needed. It will be hard, but we believe.

Welp. Ricciardeli leveled someone, I guess that was nice. But we needed 2015 Sergio.

Thoughts After a Deep Breath

It was a great season that the boys should be proud of. It sucks that it comes down to one bad quarter, but that is lacrosse for you.

Princeton Adjustment

Princeton made a great adjustment early. They knew in the first three minutes that their stock defense was useless against the Irish. They didn’t waste time scrapping Plan A.

A lot is being said about the boys’ inability to break the zone defense. It’s not a new invention or a great mystery. Zones are great at stopping runs and slowing offenses because they take up a lot of clock to break down.

If you don’t have the ball, a team can’t make the necessary effort to break a zone. The Irish barely had the ball in the late first and all of the second. There’s no secret as to the why they didn’t score. People are acting like Princeton invented the wheel.

Exhaustion

Lacrosse is comparable to hockey when it comes to explosive efforts on defense. No defense is built to sustain 3-4 minute efforts. The defense got stuck defending multiple extended efforts in a row.

They defended the unreleasable penalties well, but the efforts took their toll. More importantly, the Irish did a poor job ending possessions with subpar ground ball recovery. The ball was on the turf a lot. Princeton came up with almost all of them.

The boys exhausted themselves, exhausted defenses give up heaps of goals.

Efforts

Thomas Ricciardelli was amazing. Both goalies were incredible. Keeping up that effort behind an exhausted defense takes incredible focus and ability.

Shawn Lyght owned his matchup against Princeton’s Kabiri. It’s hard to think it could have been worse, but rampant Kabiri added to this would have resulted in a historic rout.

The boys didn’t give up. They made mistakes that inhibited a comeback, but they kept playing and there was never a point where they just hoped the clock would expire. We were happy for this.

 

The result sucked, but we love these boys.

We’ll get to breaking down the why’s in a day or so.

Go Irish

 

Luke Burgar

ND-Atl 2.0