Bishop Guertin girls lacrosse pulls away late to beat Hanover

NASHUA - With a handful of big games with division opponents coming up, the Bishop Guertin High School girls lacrosse team looked at Wednesday's game against Hanover as a bit of a test.

While the Cardinals may have passed, pulling away late to beat the Marauders 14-10 in a non-division game at Stellos Stadium, coach Kerry D'Ambroise wasn't thrilled with the way the team played.

"I don't think this was our best showing," she said. "I think school vacation isn't helping, not being on schedule. Not having practiced from those games, it's hard, you have to maintain. There aren't new additions to your plan and that's hard.

"It does show resilience and determination at the end to be able to bring it together and pull it out. That's the biggest thing. We won, we pulled it out, but it wasn't as pretty as I would have liked."

It took a while for both teams to get going offensively, as the game was scoreless through the first eight-plus minutes. Some of that could have been attributed to the Cardinals playing their third game in four days, and Hanover making the two-hour bus ride down, but Marauders coach Chris Seibel thought each team opened playing  well defensively.

"A little tight, but I have to say, both teams played really good defense right out of the box," he said. "You've got to give them a lot of credit. They didn't throw the ball away, they made good passes, they seem like a really well-coached team."

Bryn Carroll led Bishop Guertin (8-0 in Division I) with four goals and two assists and Olivia Koutsos added three goals and an assist. Kyra Lowenberg had two goals and an assist while Marie Laplante (assist), Erica Chareth, Katie Lupo, Emily Santom and Caroline Boudreau also had a goal apiece.

Hanover (4-2 in Division II) got four goals from Johanna Copeland while Molly Seibel had three goals and an assist and Maddie Lyons added a goal and two helpers.

The first half went back and forth, as neither team had more than a one-goal lead and things were tied at 5 going into the break.

Both teams made changes to their setup on the draw, but for different reasons. D'Ambroise moved Carroll out of the middle and onto the circle midway through the first half, trying to take advantage of her height.

"When we're not winning the draw in the circle, she puts me on the circle because I have that height advantage," Carroll said. "I think it was something we needed to do in that moment because it really changed the momentum in that game. The draw is everything, so it worked for us."

Not long after that switch, Molly Seibel rolled an ankle on a draw and left the game for almost 10 minutes. Hanover moved Mahler Meyerrose into the middle for the rest of the game.

"(Molly Seibel) rolled her ankle," Chris Seibel said. "I think that affected her speed. We had to take her off the draw."

The Cardinals opened the second half with two quick goals to take a 7-5 lead, and the Marauders were forced to chase the rest of the game, getting within one goal four times in the second half.

Bishop Guertin started winning the draw more consistently after halftime, taking nine in a row at one point.

"That's the name of the game right there," Carroll said. "We needed to do that. Our team is about, if one person gets a goal, another has to get one, and we just keep going. We have the momentum and that's the most important thing."

After Hanover made it a 10-9 game with 6:14 to play, the Cardinals were able to stall on offense and started to pull away.

"They started to stall the ball a little bit and that caused us to be more aggressive, left us vulnerable a little bit," Chris Seibel said. "I felt happy about our seven-on-seven defense, and it was our transition defense that kind of shot us in the foot."

Being able to pull out the win was something the Cardinals viewed as an important step, although it maybe didn't come in the way they were expecting.

"It's a learning experience, definitely, because we're going to start playing Bedford, Pinkerton and Souhegan," D'Ambroise said. "All those big games are coming, so we really need to make sure we can hang tight in those type of games."