By Zachary Carter and Cameron Levasseur
After a dominant 18-6 win over conference bottomfeeder Merrimack, the Quinnipiac women’s lacrosse team went about its business.
Players walked the field’s perimeter to pick up spare balls. Bench players jogged back and forth between the end line and the restraining line. Trainers dumped ice from coolers and collected spare sticks. Victory house music was already spilling out of the locker room underneath the bleachers. The group stretched and huddled. Head coach Jordan Christopher kept her message brief.
“Win on Saturday and we’re right back in the mix,” she said.
Looking at the Bobcats’ first six games of the season, it is head-scratching to wonder how a team that had so much success in the early going was not already “in the mix,” if not one of the top contenders to win the conference. Quinnipiac began the year 5-1, losing only to the country’s No. 4/5 ranked Yale Bulldogs. All signs pointed to a favorable conference schedule and advantageous seeding in the MAAC tournament.
But Quinnipiac went on to lose its next five games — two games on the road to end nonconference play and its first three games of MAAC play to Iona, Sacred Heart and Fairfield. Christopher noticed a pattern starting to form.
“We had to execute better when we were in our lull. We were executing almost too well at the beginning that we had to realize that we might have to grit it out a little bit when it’s not going our way,” Christopher said after the win against Merrimack. “We have kind of come out on the other side of it now.”
During nonconference play, Quinnipiac jumped out early to multi-goal leads in each of its wins, setting a pace it used to control the remainder of the game.
But as the wheels fell off in mid-March, those fast starts became unmaintainable for the Bobcats, who blew 7-3 and 6-2 leads to Sacred Heart and Fairfield during their losing stretch.
“We start games off really, really strong,” freshman midfielder Emma Miller-Ayala said. “Going toward the middle (of the season) when we went into that losing streak, we’d start to fall off that lead slowly and not climb back out.”
The team’s identity began to slip and external voices crept inside the players’ heads.
“We just had to worry about ourselves. Take care of our own business. We were in a bit of a rut where we were looking too much at other people’s records and (saying), ‘We should beat them,’ or, ‘We shouldn’t beat them,’ or whatever it may be,” Christopher said. “If we just play our brand of lacrosse we’re a really good lacrosse team.”
Exactly one month after its last win over UMass Lowell on March 5, Quinnipiac righted the ship with a 15-1 trouncing of Manhattan on April 5, earning its first MAAC win just four games before the conference tournament begins. Only eight of the MAAC’s 12 teams will make the postseason. The Manhattan win put the Bobcats back on the bubble. Wednesday’s win against Merrimack bumped them in.
“We kind of started our momentum shift with Fairfield,” Miller-Ayala said. “And ever since then we’ve been ‘Go, go, go, go, go.’ We know we need to finish the season strong to get into the playoffs.”
Manhattan and Merrimack both sit on the outside of the MAAC playoff picture. Two of Quinnipiac’s final three opponents, Canisius and Niagara, are on track for postseason berths. The road will only get more difficult for the Bobcats, but after climbing out of a month-long rut, every win seems that much closer to the summit.
“We have to take care of business on the road up at Buffalo. That’s a huge game for us. Niagara is coming off as the reigning MAAC champs, so to go up to their place and take care of business just sets a different tone for our whole team,” Christopher said. “Truthfully, I don’t know that we’ve ever beaten Niagara. I think that’s a big piece for us, too, is to get over that mental hurdle of actually being able to beat them.”
Christopher’s guess is not far off. Quinnipiac has beaten Niagara. Once, in 12 all-time meetings. And that win? It came in 2002 — since then the Bobcats have lost 11-straight games to the Purple Eagles.
But the team knows it only has so many more games guaranteed. To be the best means the team has to be beat the best, and Quinnipiac has an opportunity to do that as the season approaches its crescendo. Over 13 games, Christopher has watched her group rise, fall and get right back up again. She feels now the Bobcats are most prepared for what comes next.
“Super proud of them to stay bought into our message, to stay bought into who we are as a program and our identity,” Christopher said. “If you don’t have them locked in at this point in the year, you’re in trouble. We have them locked in, so I know we’re going to make a push here.”
