The past week has been full of early morning training, lifting, cold tubs, individual skill sessions, film review and scouting reports. Our student-athletes continue to impress our staff with how committed they are to improving.

Yesterday, we welcomed the Bald Eagles of Lock Haven to Multi-Sport Field for a noonmatch-up. We were fortunate enough to play our first HOME match in seven years on the Hilltop and for the first time ever, our current student-athletes were able to walk out of their locker room and onto their own field. While this is something that may seem simple to most, we are very appreciative of the support from our administration and grateful to our support staff (facilities and operations, sports information and marketing) for their help in bringing us back home. I’d also like to thank the parents of our players for their involvement in helping to make us feel so welcome for our first home game.

We ultimately fell 2-1 to a strong and fast Lock Haven squad. Our defense saw a significant amount of action and continued to fight through several defensive penalty corners and circle penetrations. On the attacking side of the ball, we gained some momentum in the beginning of the second half and saw some positives in terms of ball movement and outletting.  In the 60th minute, rookie Megan Parsons scored our lone goal of the day off of a penalty corner from Sarah Butterfield. While our effort in the second half simply wasn’t enough, there is much to learn from yesterday’s loss and we look forward to a hard week of practice in preparation for two tough teams in Holy Cross and Brown.

This week in training, we will place a significant focus on doing the simple things well, making smarter decisions on the ball and protecting our defensive circle by stepping OUTSIDE of it to make tackles, thus reducing the risk of defensive penalty corner after defensive penalty corner.

We will hop on the bus early Friday morning and head up to Worcester for an early evening pre-game practice. We’ll watch some film on Friday evening and get to bed early, as we are set to match up against Holy Cross at noon the next day. We will have a quick turnaround before playing at Brown at noon on Sunday.

As always, thank you for your continued support of our program and we look forward to seeing you at a game soon.