Cavaliers Just Better

BALTIMORE, Md.--Without any pomp or circumstance, the Harvard men's lacrosse team finally decided to pack it in for the year. The gutsy Crimson was beheaded by the mighty Virginia Cavaliers 23-12 in the NCAA quarterfinals yesterday at Johns Hopkins University.

Sure, it would be nice to write that Harvard clawed its way to yet another underdog victory and sent shock waves throughout the lacrosse world.

But the 10,000 men of Harvard had to contend with one rather unpleasant but undeniable fact--UVA is one he--double hockey stick of a lacrosse team.

Virginia is led by the famous Cavalier attack trio of senior Tim Whiteley, junior Michael Watson, and junior Doug Knight, and backed by a savage defense that lets very few people into its home.

With all of its units running at full-steam yesterday, Virginia was downright dangerous and gave the Crimson very few opportunities to get into the game, much less pull off an upset.

"[Harvard head coach Scott Anderson] has done a wonderful job with the team; they had a terrific season," Virginia head coach Dom Starsia said. "They sort of hit us at a time when we were certainly ready to play lacrosse."

"The three attackmen on Virginia are as good as anyone else in the nation, and I have to take my hat off to them because they're phenomenal," Harvard sophomore attackman Mike Ferrucci said.

But enough with the praises. Yesterday, what really went wrong was that a team which posted an 11-2 record during the regular season looked like it couldn't even post a letter yesterday.

This is not to say that the Crimson did not give an all-out effort and wanted a win more than anything, but several important factors contributed to Harvard's demise:

First and foremost, the Crimson had very little consistency on what is normally the strongest part of its game--the offense.

Either the Crimson sat on the ball like a mother hen on her nest, or it was shooting at the crease like they were in an old-western gunfight. Harvard's leading scorer, co-captain Mike Eckert, had Virginia's best man on him and did not get very many opportunities on net.

"I think...the lack of offense we had was based on possession," Anderson said. "We had a couple extra-man opportunities at the beginning of the game. If we had started [scoring more on these opportunities] we would have relaxed more."

"It's kind of a steam roll effect," co-captain Tim Browne said. "You don't want to be tentative on offense, but when you're down you gotta make sure even more that you're taking quality shots and getting quality possession."

Second, the Crimson defense failed to clog up the middle and prevent Virginia's speedy mid-fielders from penetrating into the crease.

At times, it looked like the defense was having an open-house in front of poor junior goalie Rob Lyng, who was bombarded with a total of 57 shots. The defense was caught between playing Virginia's star attackmen tightly outside and keeping the Cavalier mid-fielders out of the middle lane--the same problem Hofstra had playing Harvard last weekend.

"It's tough to slide when [Virginia] has three awesome attackers that finish no matter what," Browne said.

Finally, the Crimson was flat-out bullied on face-offs, winning possession only about a third of the time. Virginia had some face-off men for hire who could easily play in the NFL; face-offs can sometimes make or break a team.

"When we're winning the ball at the face-off line, and we're kind of crashing in from the middle of the field--that's our best stuff," Starsia said.

So while the Crimson's loss may have been a tough way to end a winning season, what better place to do it than in the quarter-finals of the NCAA championships and to such a high-caliber team as Virginia.

"You want your team to care," Anderson said. "We had that all year and we had it today, so I'm proud of what we did."