Tigers' Reign Over

It was only damp and drizzly on the turf Saturday in Ithaca, N.Y., but the rain still fell in sheets on the Tigers.

Princeton's men's lacrosse team (3-7 overall, 2-2 Ivy League) fell to Cornell (8-2, 5-0) in an ugly 17-4 loss that simultaneously eliminated the Tigers from the Ivy League championship race and extinguished their hopes of an NCAA tournament bid.

The Big Red crushed Princeton's spirit early on in the game with a relentless barrage of goals that began with the very first face-off.

"We had a bad break on the opening face-off — we had the ball and then lost it," head coach Bill Tierney said. "And they came down and beat us on a play we had practiced against all week."

That was only the beginning. Cornell would go on to score the next three goals before the Tigers finally responded with a goal by sophomore attack Scott Sowanick off freshman attack Alex Haynie's assist.

The Big Red would score twice more in the first quarter, and despite sophomore midfielder Mike Gaudio's best attempts to find a way past Cornell's goalkeeper, Matt McMonagle, Princeton found itself stuffed twice in a row at the end of the quarter.

In the beginning of the second quarter, it looked as though the Tigers might be able to stymie the Big Red offense. Senior goalie Matt Larkin, replacing starter junior Dave Law, started out with a good save. But on a later clear, his mistake would directly lead to yet another Cornell score.

By the time sophomore attack Peter Trombino found a way to respond to the Big Red onslaught, Princeton trailed 8-2.

It looked as though that might be the halftime score, but Cornell's Kevin Nee scored two devastating goals in the last minute of play.

Those two goals "broke our back," Tierney said. Throughout this season, the Tigers have struggled to prevent teams from scoring against them late in quarters.

In the third quarter, it became increasingly clear that the game — and this entire season, for that matter — just wasn't going to go Princeton's way. Cornell's Nee racked up goal after goal, helped by teammates Sean Greenhalgh and Justin Redd.

After seven-straight Cornell goals, a streak that spanned most of the second and third quarters, Gaudio finally found the back of the net with about half a minute left in the third quarter to make the score 15-3.

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In the fourth quarter, freshman goalie Alex Hewitt found himself in the crosshairs of the Big Red's shooters, relieving Larkin. By that time, though, there was little the Tigers could do to change the final outcome of the game.

Cornell would score twice in the fourth before Trombino scored the last, albeit meaningless, goal of the game. The final score, 17-4, put an exclamation point on the Big Red's incredible shooting throughout the game.

"They can shoot the ball extremely well. They're the best shooting team we've seen all year," Tierney said.

End of an era

Cornell's Nee, who finished with seven goals off 13 shots, led his team to at least a share of its 20th Ivy League title in school history. Because Dartmouth defeated Brown, the Big Red are now guaranteed to win at least a share of the title and the accompanying automatic berth to the NCAA tournament.

For Princeton, though, yesterday's loss denied the Tigers even a share of the title for the first time in ten years. Moreover, because Princeton has no chance to win the league title and because they cannot possibly finish the season at .500 — a requirement to win an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament — the Tigers will be absent from tournament play this May for the first time in fifteen years.

No one expected that Princeton's season would effectively end like this, nor did even Tierney see yesterday's blowout loss coming.

"We knew it could happen, but we certainly didn't believe it was going to happen," Tierney said.

The Tigers have two more games left this season, both at home. Princeton will face Dartmouth next Saturday, followed a week later by a contest against Brown. Both games will be largely for the team's seniors, who are the first class in over a decade to go all four years without an NCAA Championship win.

With a young team this year, though, and a strong recruiting class of nine coming in next year, the Tigers are optimistic about the future.

"We feel like this young team that's gone through the experiences they have. . . are going to bounce back from this [season] very quickly," Tierney said.

For now, though, Princeton's young players can only wait, learning, maturing and hoping that their turn to rain on the rest of the Ivy League and collegiate lacrosse comes soon.