Two days before the Terrapins women’s lacrosse team’s game against undefeated Cornell on Saturday, coach Cathy Reese said her squad played a complete game for the first time all season.
The top-ranked Terps beat Big Ten foe and No. 14 Northwestern, 17-4, and turned the ball over just nine times. They also held a 21-7 ground-ball advantage.
The Terps followed that result with a 17-9 win over the Big Red, but their execution on both ends of the field paled in comparison to Thursday’s contest. They tallied a season-high 17 turnovers and allowed an opponent to score a season-high nine times for the second time this year.
“I don’t even want to talk about it,” Reese said of the turnovers. “Way too many. We have to fix that by Wednesday.”
More than a minute into the game, the Terps found themselves trailing as Cornell midfielder Amie Dickson beat goalkeeper Megan Taylor. From there, though, the Terps offense went on a 6-0 run to take a 7-1 advantage against the second-best defense in the country. Cornell entered the game allowing just more than five goals per contest, yet the Terps had six goals about seven minutes in.
Even so, the Big Red remained aggressive and capitalized on the Terps’ seven first-half turnovers to stay within striking distance at intermission.
“We just came out not full of energy and not ready to attack them,” defender Nadine Hadnagy said. “We kind of sat on our heels and watched them play and us [reacting] to them.”
While the Terps extended their lead after the break — they netted the first three goals of the second half and only allowed Cornell to score three more times — the giveaways continued. The Terps turned the ball over another 10 times, and Reese said her players got ahead of themselves multiple times in transition.
And while the Terps defense held Olivia Mattyasovszky, the Big Red’s leading scorer, to one goal, Dickson scored four times. It marked the most goals the Terps have allowed a single player to score this season.
But all of that was overshadowed by the Terps attack, which ranks third in the country in goals per game (15.38). Eight different Terps scored, and midfielders Zoe Stukenberg and Taylor Cummings and attacker Caroline Wannen all recorded hat tricks.
“Anybody who is in our offensive end can score,” Wannen said. “It depends on who is open that night, but it’s nice that everybody can work together like that.”
And whenever the Big Red scored, the Terps responded, making a sloppy performance appear as a dominating win on the scoreboard.
“When [the offense is] having a good game and we’re not, they’re always there to hold it,” Hadnagy said. “It’s really nice for us.”
Facing Cornell on short rest, the Terps had to overcome several turnovers and defensive miscues in both halves. And the uncharacteristic outing came about 48 hours after defender Alice Mercer said the Terps played “a full 60 minutes” for the first time all year against Northwestern.
“We struggled in the first half to really connect together as we have been all season,” Reese said. “There were just some errors where we need to do a better job communicating with each other.”
