Eagles Win at Montreat in April Snow
David Finney
Montreat, NC - There was strange weather in the air for this second weekend in April. After a week of nice weather, a cold front came through the south bringing freezing temperatures and snow showers in some places. The Eagles were visiting Montreat in North Carolina where it was a cold Saturday for lacrosse or really doing anything outside. The team pushed through the cold weather and brief snow showers to get their final regular-season win, 25-8 and bringing their record to 10-2 overall and 6-1 in the conference. The AAC Tournament pairings will come out in the next day or so and the Eagles will learn who they will potentially be playing. They know that they will have a bye on the first day of the tournament and they will await the winner of one of the first-round games.
In Saturday's game with Montreat, several Eagles would have great days scoring. Alyssa Klinger and Jillian Mello would lead all Eagles in scoring with 5 goals each. Morgan McGhee would be close behind with 4 goals and Mia Griswold and Shelby O'Neil would have 3 goals each. McGhee would have a solid day across the board with 7 assists, 4 ground balls, and 6 draw controls to go with her 4 goals. Anna-Marie Gazzo and Macy Fulton would both have 2 goals each and Adriana Talkington added one goal.
Jessie Landers would play the full game in goal and she had 6 saves against 14 shots on goal. Ashley Steele would have 4 ground balls and caused 4 turnovers to help Landers out in defense.
The first quarter had the Eagles breakout to a quick 3-0 lead from goals by McGhee, Fulton, and O'Neil. They would quickly add to this total finishing out the quarter with an 8-3 lead. The Eagles never looked back from this point on and they continued to pour it on in the second quarter. The Eagles would enjoy a solid 17-6 lead going into the halftime break.
The Eagles only allowed 2 goals in the second half and they would put in 8 total to extend the lead to 25-8. The game would end with the 25-8 score as the Eagles would end their regular season on a dominating winning note. Look for the Eagles to keep rolling into the AAC Tournament. They are very likely to end up playing SCAD Savannah again if the seeding plays out. This would be a rematch from the game in mid-March where SCAD narrowly beat the Eagles. It was a playoff atmosphere game in the regular season so you could expect the same if the two top teams do meet up in the finals. We will have to see what happens at the end of this week, but it will be a match-up that all Women's Lacrosse fans will be wanting to see.