Portsmouth girls lacrosse capped dominant regular season with D1 title game to remember

Morgan Ruhnke never imagined the Portsmouth High School girls lacrosse team would have a season like it did.

Sure, the Clippers could go undefeated, but put up the kind of numbers that they did?

Portsmouth put up three hundred goals in 17 regular season games, an average of 17.6 per game, and five times, scored 20 or more goals. That included a three-game stretch where the Clippers topped that total, combining for 61 goals in those contests.

But it wasn't just the offense leading the way. Portsmouth was also sound defensively, holding opponents to single digits all season, with only one team scoring nine on the Clippers.

They also had just two games decided by a margin fewer than 10 goals - a 9-7 win over Pinkerton on April 18 and a 16-7 win over Nashua South on May 5.

It was more of the same once the playoffs started, as Portsmouth outscored its first two opponents by a combined 39-8. Going into the Division I championship game against Souhegan, who the Clippers beat by 10 goals during the regular season, they hoped for more of a challenge.

"I never imagined this season would be this way," Ruhnke said. "We knew it was going to be a tough game, but we realized we wanted it so badly."

Portsmouth got what it wanted, as Souhegan came out in the finale and scored the first goal, took a 3-2 lead after one quarter and never let the Clippers pull away. In the end, Portsmouth took a 12-7 win over the Sabers on June 10 to win its second-straight D1 championship and seventh title in eight years overall.

"All season we’ve been saying we want competition," Portsmouth coach JoJo Curro said. "We got competition (June 10), so now what? We had to rise to the challenge and it took us a bit to get going, to engage in that.

"We regressed back to past ways we’d played and we had to get the mentality back, like we’ve got to do this together, and the girls responded to that."

With the Sabers putting an increased amount of pressure on when Portsmouth had the ball, the Clippers had to pick it up on their end of things.

"For us, we had to keep the ball moving quickly," Curro said. "We couldn’t rely on a lot of our drives. We were holding on to the ball for too long, so we needed to make the defense shift and keep our heads up to look for the extra pass."

Leading the way was Ruhnke, one of just two seniors on the team, as she finished off her high school career with six goals in the final, giving her 80 on the season and 240 for all four years, good enough for second on the program's all-time list.

"We had some jitters in the first half," Ruhnke said. "At halftime, we kind of regrouped and took a couple of deep breaths and got through it. In the third quarter, we turned on the jets and finished it out.

"It’s the kind of game every player hopes for. I think it was just the opportunities my teammates set me up for. They allowed me to find the back of the net consistently."

Even with all the players who contributed throughout the season, it was Ruhnke who stepped up to push the Clippers where they needed to go.

"It’s just so fun to play with Morgan," Portsmouth junior defender Maddie Houghton said. "In that time we were down at the beginning of the game, she was the one who was pushing us to do better and play the game we know we can play. She’s just always there to push us and make us work harder."

It certainly helped that the players and the coaches were all focused on the same goal together.

"This team really was a family," Curro said. "We all had the same goal and we just wanted to get better and pushed each other. As a coach, that’s what I want from my players, and as a player, I hope that’s what they want from their coach, because I’m just as much a part of the family as they are."