Coming off a 14-6 loss to No. 12 Pennsylvania on March 11, the Georgetown (2-5) women’s lacrosse team travels to Indianapolis. This Saturday to face Butler (1-6) in its first Big East game of the season. Georgetown Head Coach Ricky Fries looks forward to the start of conference play.
“One, it changes the level of excitement because it is a Big East game, because there is more at stake. Butler is a first-year program, so they’re, frankly, competitively not going to be as strong. Our message is going to be this is about what we do, this is about conference and we’ve got to be sure to take care of that business,” Fries said.
Running into a hot Quakers team (5-1, 0-1 Ivy League), coach Fries attributed the Hoyas’ loss on Saturday to a lack of focus.
“The Penn game was going to be a lot better matchup. They outplayed us. They played harder than we did, and when things started to not go our way, we didn’t have a very good response. They kept rolling. We have got to correct our own mistakes and not focus on what the score is, who the opponent is but just how we’re playing, and we’re going to work on continuing to improve as a group,” Fries said.
This weekend, Georgetown faces the Butler team (1-6), which is extremely young with only five juniors and seniors out of its 28 team members. The Bulldogs have been outscored 115-61 so far this season. Redshirt sophomore midfielder Haley Hallenbeck leads the Bulldogs with 19 goals while contributing three assists on the season.
Other top scorers for the Bulldogs include junior midfielder Madison Christian with 12 goals and freshman attack Journey Fischbeck with 11 goals. Junior goalkeeper Allie Storke has 44 saves and 69 goals allowed in six games played.
For the Hoyas, junior midfielder Georgia Tunney leads the team with 14 goals. Sophomore attacks Taylor Gebhardt and Morgan Ryan follow closely behind Tunney with 13 and 11 goals, respectively. Sophomore midfielder Francesca Whitehurst leads the team with nine assists. On the defensive side, senior goalkeeper Maddy Fisher has 54 saves and 61 goals allowed in seven games.
Coach Fries attributed the Hoyas’ 2-5 record thus far to a lack of discipline and their youth. He has mentioned poor mental execution after previous losses this season, and he said that although he has seen some improvement, more work needs to be done.
“The biggest thing we have talked about so far is discipline and mental toughness. We allow a few mistakes to turn into more mistakes. One of the things we are focusing on in practice is focusing on the next plays and being accountable that we did do right or wrong. Hopefully, that will start to come to fruition. We are a pretty young group. We are relying on a lot of young players. With that is going to come some mistakes, but we’ve got to start making some improvements consistently. We’ve made some improvements but not consistently.”
The game is scheduled for 1 p.m. this Saturday.
