The Bearcats hit a serious roadblock this past Tuesday at No. 8 Cornell, as the Binghamton University men’s lacrosse team fell 19-4 to the Big Red.
This loss is the squad’s fourth straight, dropping its overall season record to just 1-4. The main reason for this defeat, according to head coach Ed Stephenson, was a lack of fundamentals, resulting in a huge deficit for Binghamton.
“We definitely didn’t play fundamentally sound on the defensive end,” Stephenson said. “It was a really tough day, and we got away from what we wanted to do in this game … [Cornell] is a good enough team to take advantage of the mistakes you make, and that’s what they did.”
The match started out evenly — at the end of the first quarter the Bearcats were down by only one goal. By the half, however, they were down 8-3, and Cornell outscored Binghamton 6-1 in the third quarter. Down by 10 goals at the start of the last 15 minutes, there was little hope for the Bearcats as the Big Red scored five more goals. Stephenson was dismayed at the second- and third-quarter performance, chalking up a lot of the lopsided goal totals to time of possession.
“We only had the ball 20 percent of the time in the second and third quarter,” he said. “It was a pretty even matchup 3-2 coming out of the first quarter and then the second and third they dominated.”
This match was marked by the large amount of time that the Bearcat defense played. Almost every time the team got the ball on offense, it seemed that it turned it over immediately and went back to playing defense. Binghamton logged 23 turnovers during the game, something Stephenson attributed to the persistent defensive stance the team had to take.
“We had turnovers on offense when we did get the ball, a little bit out of frustration because we played so much defense,” he said. “If you’re sitting down there and you’re just watching as a spectator and we keep playing defense, when they give you the ball, we let go of it a little too soon and get turnovers.”
Another indication of Cornell’s dominance over the Binghamton unit was the shot differential, in which the Big Red outshot the Bearcats 51-29. More than half of Cornell’s shots came in the second and third quarters, during which time 11 went through for goals.
“The shot differential is gonna come when you play two full quarters and you don’t get the ball on offense, so that just comes with the time of possession,” Stephenson said, “If [Cornell] possesses the ball for 80 percent of the time, they’re gonna get 80 percent more shots, which is what happened, so that comes down to the territory of both ground balls and defense.”
Of the four Bearcat goals, two were from junior Frank Donlon, who recorded his third multi-goal game, and one was from freshman phenom Matt Springer, who has scored in every game this season and leads the team with 13 goals. With his performance thus far, Stephenson is trying to get him to the ball as much as possible in the games to come.
“He’s dynamite,” Stephenson said, regarding Springer. “In this game he just didn’t get to touch the ball a lot. We’re gonna change some things around so that he gets more touches. He is such a dynamic player and he just has such offensive skill. In a game like that we were kind of relying on the midfield to create and let him finish, but we struggled in getting him some looks, so we’re gonna try to get him more looks in the future.”
This discussion of the future is imperative after getting off to a rough start. Though the Bearcats have played some tough teams so far this season, including two nationally ranked teams, the competition is only going to get tougher as the season goes on. When talking about working on issues for the games to come, Stephenson again stressed a back-to-basics approach.
“We’ve gotta get the fundamentals down on defense,” he said. “Offensively we played well at times … [but] I don’t think we played enough offense. We took a step back at the Cornell game, we were hoping to reduce those turnovers and play some fundamentally sound defense and we didn’t do that, so we gotta regroup and get back to the fundamentals and give ourselves a chance to win these games.”
The Bearcats are set to play undefeated Marist this Saturday. Stephenson hopes that after reevaluating the team’s defensive tactics and going back on the offensive to maintain possession, the Bearcats will have a shot.
“It’s going to be a tough road trip, playing an undefeated team,” he said of the upcoming match. “They’ve got some momentum going, and we’ve got to get some momentum going. Right now, we’ve got to get back to the fundamentals this week, and go down there and play fundamentally sound and give ourselves a chance to win that game.”