Women's lacrosse humbles Cornell on Friday night

The women's lacrosse team (6-3 overall, 2-0 Ivy League) displaced Cornell from its first place position in the league standings Friday night with a 9-2 victory.

This was the Tigers' second straight Ivy win this season and the twelfth straight since they lost to Dartmouth way back in 2001.

From Cornell's standpoint, the outcome snapped its undefeated 6-0 record, its 14-game home winning streak, and any hopes for the Ivy crown that had until Friday still been up for grabs.

The Tigers did more than just beat the Big Red, they humbled a team that had entered Friday's game having defeated everyone else in their schedule by an average margin of 11 goals.

Against an impregnable Princeton defense headed by senior Rachael Becker and anchored by sophomore goaltender Sarah Kolodner, Cornell could only squeeze out two goals for the duration of the game, the first of which did not arrive until more than eighteen minutes and four Princeton goals had passed.

Junior midfield Theresa Sherry headed the charge with three goals, followed by senior attack Whitney Miller and sophomore midfield Elizabeth Pillion who both added two. Sophomore attack Leigh Slonaker and senior midfield Alex Fiore rounded out the nine with one apiece.

It was a lack of execution not a lack of effort that plagued the Big Red. This fact is not exactly surprising given the Tigers' championship-caliber defense that propelled them to the national title last year. The two teams committed the same number of turnovers, collected an equivalent number of ground balls, and fired off a respectable number of shots against each other, but Cornell simply could not find the back of the net.

Cornell's Jamie Quinn scored both of her team's goals by dashing to the middle, connecting with an assist from a teammate standing behind the goal, and sliding the ball past Kolodner. That, however, seemed to be the only strategy that mustered any results for the Big Red as the Tigers slashed past the defense and left it kicking helplessly in the mud.

The first strike

Less than seven minutes after the opening draw, Miller connected with Fiore — the first of her game-high three assists — for the first goal of the contest, which was followed by three more from Pillion, Miller and Sherry by the 17:26 mark.

Just after Cornell's first goal, when it seemed things were looking up for them, the Tigers took the reigns again with a deuce of unassisted points from Sherry and Miller that sealed off the first half.

Cornell sounded the first bell of the next period by sliding in its second point, but the Tigers slammed the door and held it shut for the remainder of the game. Kolodner recorded five of her nine saves in the second half alone, and Miller added two more assists to finish off her team's final two goals.

According to the International Women's Lacrosse Coaches Association's most recent poll, Princeton and Cornell are ranked No. 5 and No. 7, respectively. While the closeness of their rankings suggests parity in their achievements so far this season, Princeton has historically been and continues to be the one to dominate the Big Red and raze its pursuit of Ivy and national conquest. The Tigers have won 23 of the last 25 games between the two teams.

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Last year, the Big Red made it all the way to the national semifinals without a single loss except, sure enough, to the Tigers. They ended up losing to Georgetown, who went on to become the Princeton's next and final victim of the 2002 season.

So of the three teams besides Princeton that made it to the final four last year, including North Carolina and Georgetown, Cornell was the only one that did not have the opportunity to face the eventual champions in a post-season contest.

The Tigers will take a quick respite from league play on April 9 to face Temple, and then will travel to Yale on the 12th for the first of four consecutive Ivy games. That will take them to No. 1 Maryland on April 30, who were the previous national champions prior to Princeton.