X marked the spot. Elkton's Tyler Durant dominated the faceoff X, winning 25 of 27 faceoffs and the Elks scored the game's first five goals on the way to a 17-7 triumph over host Perryville Friday night. Durant also collected four goals and four assists.
"He killed us," Perryville coach Chris Soper said of Durant. "He killed us. He dominated the game. And faceoffs have been a problem for us all year. Ground balls in general have been a problem for us all year. If you're not winning faceoffs and you're not picking up ground balls, you don't have a lot of possessions and you get beat. And that's what happened [Friday night]." We spotted them [a 5-0 lead] and we're not good enough to do that. I don't know many teams that are. We gave them six and we fell apart and we never got back into it. We're thin [because of injuries] but that's no excuse. That's no excuse. We're just not playing good lacrosse." Four Elkton players recorded four goals. Josh Taylor tallied four goals and three assists. Brady O'Neill notched four goals and two assists. Joe Scuderi supplied four goals and an assist. Jeffrey Day also added a goal. Trailing 5-0, Perryville finally got on the board on a Nick Roberts goal with 1:06 left in the first quarter. Elkton answered with another five-goal run and never led by less than six the rest of the way. Soper did not see this coming. "I felt real good about our team the last couple days," he said. "We've had a couple good practices coming into this. We weren't real sharp about a week ago against Joppatowne. We did a couple things to try to correct those [mistakes] and we had a couple good practices leading up to [Friday night]. I'd be lying to you if I said I didn't feel good about us coming into the game. We had a nice chalk talk upstairs before the game. We talked about who their guys were and who was going to do what. And we knew going in who we needed to defend and play and we didn't do it. That's kind of where we are, unfortunately. We've got a lot of work to do. I imagine we'll see them again in the playoffs at some point, hopefully. I just told the guys [after the game], 'We've got to be playing our best in May. It's April 8th. We've got three weeks to make ourselves better. And I told them it starts [Saturday] so we'll see what happens." Roberts paced the Panthers with three goals. Matt Woods added a goal and an assist. Nick Ports, Drew Crouse, and Dalton Dunman each chipped in a goal and Dominic Muscella had an assist. Perryville was without injured starting goalie Matt Mannone, who was replaced by freshman Vinny Gugliotta. "I think Vinny Gugliotta did a really good job," Soper said. "Kid's a freshman. First varsity start. Obviously, not having Matt is important because Matt calms us down and he can help us clear, commands the defense, and does some things we didn't have. We were missing [starting defenseman] Joe Perry, too. We're going to be missing him for maybe the remainder of the year. He's out for four weeks. We just need to keep working. We get Matt back [this week], which is good. He'll step back in and we'll just have to get back to work. We're not going to have Joe. We've got to learn how to play without Joe. Maybe playing without Joe and Matt was a little too much for us to overcome. But we'll hope that getting Matt back will make us a little better down there." Comments are closed.
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