It was a great day to be a Panther yesterday on Youngman field as the team played their best game of the year to take down Wesleyan 12-5. You couldn't have asked for a nicer day for a game with the temperature in the mid 60's.

As it's already been reported, Wesleyan came out in man to man defense to start the game much to our surprise. We had heard that they've mixed in some man this year in other games but haven't played it consistently.

At the end of the day it wouldn't have mattered what defense they were playing yesterday as 4 of our goals came in transition and 3 others came on man-up. We always talk about starting our offense at the defensive end of the field with our d-middies and our goalie getting the ball out of his stick quickly and that's exactly what we did against the Cardinals. Defensive middies Alex Englert (2g's), Alex Giammarco (1g), and Matt Virtue were pushing the ball all day long and putting a lot of pressure on the Wesleyan defense.

Credit also needs to go to our defense that has been able to consistently create turnovers and not only put the ball on the ground this year but get it up quickly and get our transition game going. I'm excited to see this group continue to develop this year as we have some very athletic and talented players at that end of the field.

It was nice to finally have more than a couple man-up opportunities yesterday and our guys took advantage of them. We ended up going 3 for 4 and didn't really do anything too fancy. We got into our 3-3 set otherwise known as "Larry" named long ago for Larry Bird. The first goal was an absolute rip by Jack Balaban who's playing in the top center spot of the 3-3, he did a nice job of stepping into a seam as we were moving the ball around and stuck it in the upper corner. The next man-up goal was a top down feed from Balaban to Tim Cahill who's our crease guy. We've always told our crease guys that if they catch a top down feed to expect pressure from underneath and look to the pipes for one of our low attackmen. That's exactly what Tim did and he found Pete Smith sneaking on the pipe for another great man-up goal. The last goal on man-up came as Andrew Conner made a nice skip pass across the top to David Hild who took a low pass and quickly got off a low-to-high shot that stung the upper corner.

It was good to get a few of our offensive players going yesterday to get them some confidence again, namely Jack Balaban (1,0), David Hild (3,0), and Pete Smith (2g, 3a) as they're going to be critical to our success this year.

Finally, we learned about 2 hours before game time that our main face off specialist, Brian Foster wasn't going to be able to play due to illness. This meant that Peter Jennings who had taken a total of 2 face offs in our first two games combined was going to be our guy. Wesleyan has a pretty good face off guy at the x and things started off slow for Peter. By the second half though, Peter stuck with it and ended up going 4 for 5 in the third quarter as we expanded our 7-3 halftime lead to 11-3 going into the 4th.

This was a true team win with many outstanding performances. Next up is W&L this Tuesday down at Georgetown University, game time is 7pm. Hopefully we'll see some of you there!

That's it for now, heading out for a quick practice before we head South!