BALTIMORE – After a rocky start Saturday, the Terrapin men’s lacrosse team scored five goals in the first 18 minutes of the second half to take a four-goal lead against Johns Hopkins.
But instead of going for the kill against their in-state rivals, the Terps played it safe, slowing their offense to a crawl and netting just one score through the rest of the 10-9 victory.
The Terps’ stall ball — a long-standing criticism of coach Dave Cottle’s offense — did its job, but not by much.
“When we got a decent lead, we were trying to control the ball more and keep it on the offensive end and keep it away from them, because their attack and middies, they were putting goals in,” long pole Jesse Bernhardt said.
Still, Bernhardt was the only Terp to score in the final 12:12 of the win, grabbing a faceoff and running it all the way to the cage. Though the No. 4 Terps (8-2) controlled possession for much of the final 30 minutes against the No. 19 Blue Jays (5-6), the goal was one of few aggressive offensive displays at the end of the match.
“We didn’t tell them not to shoot, but we didn’t tell them to,” Cottle said.
The coach said that once the Terps took the lead in the third quarter, they sometimes passed up scoring opportunities on an exposed cage, though Cottle said he didn’t put on the brakes.
“If we’re winning faceoffs like we were and we have the chance to throw it in an open goal, then go ahead and do it,” Cottle said.
Still, all the Terps, including Cottle, emphasized the importance of possession to their win. They won 9-of-13 faceoffs and collected 19-of-25 ground balls in the second half, helping them win time of possession for the game even after the Blue Jays controlled the first half.
After the Terps came back from a one-goal halftime deficit to take a four-goal lead in the fourth quarter, players said they wanted to slow the game down to stay firmly in control of their advantage and the pace of the game.
A series of stall warnings they received late in the game showed they might have slowed things too much. At one point in the fourth quarter, the Terps received four stall warnings in a row, capped by a turnover on a time violation that led to another goal for the Blue Jays in their late-game rally.
“We were just ticking away at that clock,” short stick midfielder and face-off specialist Bryn Holmes said. “They were calling quick stalls, but that’s a part of the game. We were expecting that to happen. But we kept playing the way we needed to play.”
After two more Johns Hopkins scores, the last with one minute remaining, the Terps’ stalling tactic again nearly cost them a regulation win.
Up by just one goal, the team took the ensuing faceoff and continued to hold the ball on offense. Holmes got possession and ran more than 40 seconds off the clock, but the Blue Jays forced a turnover with 13 seconds left for a chance to send the game to overtime. This time, though, it was Johns Hopkins who didn’t have enough time to get a shot off.
The Terps, though, made no excuses.
“Even though we’ve had a lot of close games, we keep our head in those situations,” Jesse Bernhardt said. “We just had to do what we had to do.”
kyanchulis@umdbk.com
