The 15th-ranked Boston University lacrosse team will be looking in the mirror, so to speak, when it squares off Wednesday against also-15th-ranked Yale University.
The Terriers (2-2), who along with the Bulldogs (3-2) received 94 votes in the most recent IWLCA coaches’ poll, will face their third straight top-20 opponent in six days, after dropping matches to No. 5 Loyola College and 12th-ranked Johns Hopkins University over the weekend.
Terrier coach Liza Shoemaker said that in the losses, her young team came away with some valuable experience – an important stepping stone for a team with a roster made up mostly of sophomores and juniors.
“I think we’re getting beat first mentally and then it adds up physically for the team on the field,” she explained. “We’re a very young team, and we’re only four games into the season. I think we just need to ease up on the pressure we’re putting on ourselves and go out there and play our game.”
In the first two games of the season, the Terriers amassed large leads over their opponents, only to allow late rallies at the end of each contest. Luckily, they were able to hold off their opponents long enough to jump out of the gates with a 2-0 record.
BU continued the trend of allowing an opponent to go on an offensive spurt against Loyola and Johns Hopkins – most notably when they couldn’t hold on to a 6-4 halftime lead against Loyola and scored only one goal in the second half in a 12-7 loss.
“The biggest thing for us will be to go out and focus on our game,” Shoemaker said. “Obviously, [Wednesday] is a big game, but we need to just get past that and play for a solid 60 minutes.
“We need to maintain our physical intensity for the whole game, no matter what the score is,” she added.
Today’s meeting with Yale will signal the end of a hellish stretch of the schedule for the Terriers, although the difficulty should have the team well prepared for the beginning of the conference season against the University of Vermont on April 3.
While some coaches prefer to use the beginning of a season to fine-tune their teams’ game against inferior opponents, Shoemaker said she is glad her squad faces such challenging opponents early because as conference play begins, the opponents become somewhat easier.
“We wouldn’t want to have any more cupcakes on the schedule than we already have,” the coach said. “It’s great for us to be able to go out there and go 6-4 in one half against the [5th-ranked] team in the country.”
The Terriers are also looking forward to the comfort of playing somewhere as familiar as Nickerson Field after slogging through the first four games on the road. Last season, BU played a perfect home schedule, going 8-0, with its last home loss coming against Brown University on April 24, 2002.
“We’re thrilled to get back [to Nickerson],” said Shoemaker. “It’s nice not to have to ride the bus to the game and to sleep in your own bed. It definitely makes a difference.”
As the squad braces to end the brief two-game skid, the Terriers will have to come out and realize that most of what they do on the field stems from how they are mentally prepared for the game, especially for such a youthful team.
“We have one senior out there and two freshmen, but we’re mostly just sophomores and juniors,” said Shoemaker. “We just need to come out confident against Yale.”
In the Bulldogs, the Terriers will also face their first opponent that is still at the beginning point of the season. Loyola and Johns Hopkins were both playing their seventh game of the season when they faced the Terriers.
“It’s not just that it’s early for us,” said Shoemaker. “Other teams are on their seventh games, and going down to their home field when they have that much experience is tough.”
Today’s match against Yale is scheduled to begin at 4 p.m.