The Colorado Mesa Mavericks women’s lacrosse team defeated Adams State University 19-0 in their only matchup of the season Sunday afternoon. CMU was led by junior attacker Mary Koch who had four goals and three assists and junior attacker Paige Elliott who had two goals and six assists in the game.
“Something we are always working on is pacing,” CMU coach Shanta Loecker said, “and it’s always kind of a challenge, and anytime you have an opportunity to work on that and work on it together, you have to take it, so really we were just trying to practice different elements of pacing our offense.”
The first half started fast with Koch scoring her first goal off of a great assist by Elliott on a play where Elliott forced a turnover and picked up the groundball. In the first 15 minutes of this game, the Mavericks established their dominance by scoring 10 goals, with only one of those goals being unassisted, and the goal coming off a free-position shot. Koch had two goals and two assists just 15 minutes into this game.
The last 15 minutes of the half, the Mavericks were still carrying all the momentum in the game, and they continued to dominate the half. Koch scored the first goal in the final 15 minutes and got an assist on the next scored goal. CMU held a 13-0 lead at halftime, as they lead in nearly every statistical category other than saves. ASU’s goalie Louisa Sanchez had seven saves at the break.
“We really stuck with our zone, we have been playing it all year, and we stayed in that pretty much the whole game,” Loecker said. “We changed our ride a couple of times to work some different looks, and again we just tried to be precise in the zone we’ve been using this season,” Coach Loecker said
The start of the second half the Mavericks came out fast and scored three goals within four minutes, but they slowed their offense down shortly after those goals. Freshman midfielder Ashton Whittle scored her second goal of the day to put the Mavericks up 17-0 with 25 minutes left on the game clock. CMU scored their final two goals with 20 minutes, and instead of running up the score, CMU accepted the last seven shot clock violations of the game.
“We had a 19-goal rule today, so as soon as that margin happened, we knew we weren’t going to shoot, but we can still use the 90 seconds as an opportunity to work on our pacing, to work on our shapes and urgency,” Loecker said. “Then if the ball turnovers cause of a shot-clock violation we can work on our rides and defense, so we were just trying to make sure we were playing a complete game.”
ASU’s Sanchez finished the game with seven saves on 26 shots on goal.
The Mavericks finished with 21 groundballs and 18 draw controls on the day. CMU had nine different goal scorers and 10 different point scorers, as they had seven different players with two or more goals.
