The Rising Sun boys lacrosse team withstood a furious fourth quarter rally by host Elkton and came away with an 8-7 triumph Wednesday. The Tigers had a seeming comfortable 7-3 lead with eight minutes left before Elkton reeled off three goals in a 22-second span.
"It's always nice to see these teams improving," Rising Sun coach Chris King said, referring to the Elks. "As a lacrosse person, I love seeing teams getting better and better. But we feel confident in our abilities this year. It's always those things where if we do what we need to do, we feel like we can win the game. It was just getting our guys resettled after that. Defensively, we pretty much had them the whole game. Just at the end, [Tyler Durant] started beating us on those faceoffs and that kind of changed the tide a little bit. We just got back to basics and got out heads back and were able to stop the flow there." Connor Burkhardt countered to restore Rising Sun's two-goal lead on with 6:29 remaining. He moved left in front of the cage and flipped a shot into the net. "I saw a double [team] coming," said Burkhardt. "Went over top and just took what I had. I wasn't really thinking." Elkton's Tyler Durant brought his team back within one with 48 seconds left and then won the ensuing faceoff. But Elkton made an errant pass and Rising Sun attackman Brad Alexander was able to scoop it up at midfield with 11 seconds to go and ran out the clock. "I have to give it to our defense," Burkhardt said. "They really pulled us out. [We're a] high-scoring offensive team, usually, but we only put up eight goals. Noah played lights out in the fourth quarter. He made some really great saves that kept us in the game." Burkhardt led Rising Sun with three goals and an assist. Alexander added two goals and two assists. Wyatt Griffith tallied the game's first goal and Quinn Struble scored to start the fourth quarter. Austin Phlistine notched three assists. Durant paced the Elks with four goals and Joe Scuderi, Brady O'Neill, and Josh Taylor each added a goal. One key for the Tigers was their ability to somewhat neutralize Durant at the faceoff x. "We saw he was doing really good so we practiced, had to prepare for him, working on how our guys could do some defensive moves," King said. "We have some good faceoff guys, to boot, too. So we thought our guys would handle themselves just by doing that. And we put some thing in just to change some things around, things that maybe they haven't seen before. Just play with the mind, so to speak." Except for that 22-second stretch, Rising Sun held its own. "The idea is you're trying to see how successful he's being," said King. "If he's beating you, beating you, then you have to go into, all right, how do we defend so we don't [allow] a transition goal, which we saw happen a couple times today. They're pretty good at turning that ball and getting a quick goal off of the faceoff. It's getting the guys in the right spots and having the right people out there to play defense. That's what we worked on [at practice the day before]." Comments are closed.
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