Kali Shumock receives Patriot League Rookie of the Week honors

In its first conference game of the season, the Boston University field hockey team earned a 2-1 victory over Lafayette College Saturday afternoon in Easton, Pennsylvania.

The Terriers (4-3, 1-0 Patriot League) took the lead in the 31st minute of the game when freshman midfielder/forward Kali Shumock tallied her first goal of the season and the first of her collegiate career. The goal, and a later assist on sophomore forward Amanda Cassera’s game-winner, helped Shumock earn Patriot League Rookie of the Week honors.

Shumock was a four-year starter during her time at Liberty High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and was named the 2014 Lehigh Valley multi-sport athlete of the year and scholar-athlete of the year.

In addition to Shumock’s honors, Cassera got the nod in the Honorable Mentions section of the weekly conference awards after scoring in both of BU’s games on Saturday and Sunday, while senior goalkeeper Valentina Cerda Eimbcke also gained recognition for her nine saves over the course of both contests.

Healthy defense, healthy gam

With an already thin roster in terms of numbers, the Terriers have had some setbacks with player health. Until this weekend, junior fullback Katie Bernatchez was sidelined for most of the season, while BU was also without sophomore fullback Bea Baumberger Altirriba. Now that the two are getting back to 100 percent, the team’s play at the back is tightening up.

“It’s just gaining confidence in what we’re doing and that what we’re doing is working,” said BU coach Sally Starr. “We’re finally getting healthy.

“[Altirriba and Bernatchez] are two very good players for us, so we were able to get them both on the field at the same time, which is helping us really begin to play with the lineups that we want and the formations that we want.”

Junior fullback Rachel Coll is also a major contributor on the back end. She is the go-to for attack penalty corner inserts and scored the game-winning goal in Sunday’s overtime thriller against Yale University on a feed from sophomore midfielder Hester van der Laan.

“Rachel has played three different positions for us this season, so flexibility has been awesome with her,” Starr said. “She’s a talented hockey player, she has a great attitude and she’s a great athlete.”

Coll impresses not just defensively, but also on the attack. She is known to take the ball down the field herself on occasion to get things going for the offense.

“She’s a very good two-way player,” Starr said. “She’s a very good defensive player, a very good attacking player and she’s definitely been a backbone for us for sure.”

Two-game win streak shows maturity in Terriers

Five games into its schedule, BU had not been able to string two wins together, alternating results for the past three weeks. With games six and seven in the books, the Terriers finally have consecutive victories on their record.

Both of the weekend’s victorious matchups followed a similar storyline. BU would score first, while the opposing team would later even the score, leading to two close, hard-fought results.

“The win at Lafayette [4-4, 0-1 Patriot League] was a huge win for us,” Starr said. “What I love about this team, we scored first, they tied it up and we were able to answer back with the game-winning goal, and I love that about that game.

“The game on Sunday against Yale [1-5], again back-to-back games. We played Saturday in Pennsylvania, we have a game the next day and it was a scrappy win, again. We scored early, they tied us, they went up, we tied it and we found a way to win it in overtime.”

In games like these, where the win is completely up for grabs and both sides are putting up incredible fights, the victor is often the squad that does the best job at handling high-pressure situations.

“We do a lot of work with just staying in the moment, working the process, not really getting caught up in the outcome and just really doing the things that we can control, and that’s playing hard, playing smart, playing together.

“When you focus on the outcome…you get tight, tentative and tense. With this team: Just really keep staying focused, keep staying calm and doing what they need to do. A lot of maturity happened over this weekend.”