Last Saturday afternoon, the Georgetown women’s lacrosse team found themselves in an all-too-familiar position—behind. The team, something of a national powerhouse in recent years, started the game down 4-0 to Rutgers.
The Hoyas (8-5, 6-0 Big East) rebounded in a big way, though, coming back to trounce the Scarlet Knights 19-12, continuing a five-game winning streak and preserveing an unblemished conference record.
“We were a little flat coming out to be honest,” head coach Ricky Fried said. “I thought we lacked some energy. But for where we’ve been at the early part of the season we responded really well.”
Photo courtesy of Sports Information
The Hoyas weren’t in a good place earlier in the season. Heading into Big East play they were just 2-4 and coming off three consecutive losses. No one was writing Georgetown off—those losses were to some of the country’s best teams, including five-time defending national champion Northwestern—but there was a lot of work to be done in the conference season if the Hoyas hoped to make it back to the NCAA tournament.
“The biggest thing was recognizing who we’re playing and focusing on us getting better as opposed to what our record was,” Fried said. “Four of the five losses were to the top four teams in the country.”
Nevertheless, losing that many games that quickly could suck the hope out of even the most talented team. The Hoyas had to make sure that a non-conference slump didn’t turn into a season-long slide.
That responsibility fell to senior attacker Molly Ford and the rest of Georgetown’s veteran leaders. They weren’t going to give up on their final campaign, and they made sure the younger players knew it.
“We told them, ‘Keep the faith, and we’re going to keep pushing on through the whole season. The season’s not over yet,’” Ford said.
It turns out the season was just getting started. Georgetown picked up a win against Villanova, and then after a minor setback against Princeton, rattled off five consecutive Big East wins. The streak guaranteed the Hoyas a spot in the conference tournament and gave them the opportunity to control their NCAA tourney destiny: win and they’re in.
Ford, the team’s leading scorer, and her fellow seniors have led the Hoyas in the locker room and on the field. Eight of the team’s goals against Rutgers came from seniors, including two from Ford, who earned a spot on the Big East Weekly Honor Roll for the third time this season.
“The biggest thing they’ve done is keep the morale on the team up,” Fried said of his seniors. “It would have been easy for people to kind of pack it in, say ‘You know, I don’t know how we’re going to do this year.’ But they didn’t allow the team to do that. They made sure that everybody showed up on practice days, made sure we had the right focus that we needed to have to be successful, and I think that was contagious to the rest of the team.”
Team morale is hardly a concern now. Georgetown is locked in on its next goal: winning the Big East Tournament, where the Hoyas have come up short the past three years. This year taking the conference championship is more important than ever, as their early season losses put the Hoyas’ hopes for an at-large bid at risk even if they win their final three games.
Georgetown will be well prepared come tournament time. The Hoyas have taken steps this season to make sure that they won’t be repeating the past years’ early exits.
“We’ve challenged ourselves this year,” Fried said. “We’ve had three Friday-Sunday weekends. So I think we’ll be a little bit more prepared [for a quick turnaround]. We’ve played a lot more people this year. We’ve probably averaged playing 20 people a game, so we’ll be a little fresher at that time of the year.”
Only two weeks remain until the Big East Tournament. Before then Georgetown has a non-conference trip to Yale this Friday, followed by its final Big East games against Loyola (Md.) and Syracuse. And while the Hoyas will keep an eye on the tournament, their focus is squarely on their next game. One thing’s for sure—the Hoyas certainly aren’t looking back.
“I feel like our team has kind of forgotten about the beginning … losses of the season,” Ford said. “With this momentum with the Big East we’re just concentrating on winning out the Big East. That’s our full focus right now.”
