Before playing Albany on Wednesday night, the Terrapins men’s lacrosse team had played four games in the 25 days since last running out of the Maryland Stadium tunnel.
Three road games along the East Coast plus a five-day trip for a game in California left the Terps with little time to rest. They’d battled the nation’s top two scoring defenses in Yale and Notre Dame and crammed clashes at Drexel and Princeton into last week’s schedule.
So before facing No. 10 Albany, coach John Tillman made a deal with his players: if they downed the Great Danes, they wouldn’t have practice Thursday.
Behind a balanced scoring effort, the Terps captured a 10-7 victory against No. 10 Albany under the Maryland Stadium lights to earn some downtime.
“Given where we’ve been in the last two weeks, we really need to take a deep breath,” Tillman said. “The kids have really worked hard.”
In the early part of their road stand, the Terps offense struggled to find a rhythm, combining for nine goals in back-to-back losses to the Bulldogs and Fighting Irish. So in a conference call Tuesday morning, Tillman admitted he hadn’t expected his offense’s 17-goal burst against the Tigers last Saturday.
He was pleased to see the Terps maintain that efficiency in their return to College Park.
Attackmen Matt Rambo and Colin Heacock and midfielders Tim Rotanz and Bryan Cole contributed two goals apiece in the team’s third straight victory. In total, eight Terps tallied at least one point.
“We have a lot of guys that can play,” Cole said. “We have a lot of guys who can threaten a defense.”
The Terps have emphasized quick ball movement to start the campaign, and Rotanz opened scoring when a flurry of passes ended with the converted attackman redirecting a pass from midfielder Lucas Gradinger.
Heacock, who has returned to the attack role he had in high school, pushed the lead to 3-1 with his team-leading 13th goal later in the period.
Standing at the top of the attacking third, the junior motioned for midfielder Henry West to run to his right, drawing his Great Danes defender to the side. Then, Heacock moved up the left sideline. Before the angle between his stick and the goal disappeared, he unleashed a shot that latched onto the right side of the netting.
Cole, who also scored with a laser seven seconds before the first-quarter horn sounded, ensured the Terps a four-goal gap entering intermission by lacing in a feed from midfielder Connor Kelly.
Once his attempt hit the net, Cole spun around and shuffled his feet in a dance before teammates interrupted with an embrace.
“We obviously want to set the tempo,” Cole said. “We want to have other teams play up to our speed and dictate the pace of the game.”
Faceoff specialist Austin Henningsen helped his team gain control. The Terps said the freshman’s performance in the X — he went 16-for-20 on the night —helped keep the defense fresh.
Albany tested the backline in the third quarter, rattling off three unanswered goals, including the final score of Great Danes leading goal-scorer Seth Oakes’s hat trick, to cut the Terps’ lead to 7-6.
“[In] the first quarter, I think they only had [three] shots, and I was without a save up until that point,” said goalkeeper Kyle Bernlohr, who finished with seven stops. “All of the sudden, they came with a flurry.”
So the Terps dug deeper. Henningsen won all five faceoffs in the final quarter. The Terps scooped up eight of their 29 grounds balls. Heacock, Rambo, and Kelly broke the defense.
In the post-game press conference, Tillman glanced to Cole and Bernlohr as he commended that. The Terps failed to mount late surges against their other two ranked opponents this season.
With a smile on his face, Tillman said he was ready to see more —at 6 a.m. on Thursday.
“Joking with those guys,” Tillman countered to the wide-eyed looks from his senior leaders. “We have a lot of guys that have just worked incredibly hard that could use some rest.”
