SPECIALTY PROTECTION
WOMEN'S PROTECTIVE
Gettysburg, PA - The Salisbury Sea Gulls used a 6 goal third quarter to pull away from a back-and-forth first half. Jimmy Creighton led the way with two goals and three assists, Ryan Rohde followed with two and two. Dan Boyer, Mike Hurley and Matt Dasinger notched three, two and two goals respectively. Max Zarchin contributed to the win with 11 saves, 4 coming in the final quarter to hold off any Gettysburg comeback attempt. Bryan Pryor and Jared Harriman contributed three points each in the losing effort.
In front of 3,657 people, the Salisbury Sea Gulls notched their 60th straight victory. A streak that extends back to 2003. The loss is Gettysburg’s first of the season, as the Bullets now sit at 7-1 heading into Centennial Conference play. The game started out looking as if it were going to be all Salisbury as the Gulls jumped out to a 2-0 lead. However, Gettysburg managed to net two before the end of the first. Gettysburg grabbed its first and only lead of the day on Jared Harriman’s 2nd goal of the day, less than two minutes into the 2nd quarter. Salisbury’s Dan Boyer notched the only other goal of the quarter to send the game into the half knotted at three.
“The first half was like a chess match. Every possession felt like forever. Both teams are very athletic, playing a lot of players, so there’s not really any transition because everybody’s getting back in the hole,” said Salisbury’s Jim Berkman. “That first possession we had was really long, then they came down and had a long possession.”
The Gulls would again score the first two goals of the half to start the second, but Gettysburg eased the tide with a goal in response to keep it at 5-4. Salisbury went on a three goal run to stretch the lead to 8-4. Again Gettysburg wouldn’t fade away and answered with two goals of their own. Senior Evan Gallant picked up a loose ball in front of the net off a Max Zarchin save and put it away with 1:02 to play in the quarter. On the ensuing face-off, Chris Renzi took what he started and beat Zarchin on a low shot to the far pipe, leaving the lead at just 2 with 49 seconds remaining in the third. The momentum Salisbury had built up had been regained by the home team. A goal by Matt Dasinger with just :03 left in the quarter stole it right back. Gettysburg also hit two pipes in the quarter.
From there, between the commanding defensive performance and great ball movement and possession on offense, Salisbury put the game away, adding goals late when Gettysburg was desperately trying to get the ball back. “I thought we did a better job clearing the ball in the second half. We wanted to run some more set pieces instead of motions to try and do a little more picking at halftime,” said Berkman. “We did a good job of going to our little game that we run at the end of the game that we call the “finisher”, where we finish, they didn’t get the ball back, if they give us an easy goal we take it.”
”It’s a great win against a great team. That’s one of the best teams..this is one of the better teams that Gettysburg’s ever had as far as the depth. Three seniors have started for four years at attack. A goalie that’s started for three years. It’s a veteran team, they’ve had a lot of confidence, they’ve beaten a lot of formidable opponents,” commented Berkman. “To come up here, and I think our defense came today, there were a lot of questions in the pre-season. With Bigas gone, White gone, Incontrera gone, Korpon gone, what was the Gull D gonna be? Our offense did a good job of biding us some time and they’ve gotten better and better. And you saw today, defensively we’re a pretty good team. Individually defensively we’re awful good and the team stuff’s starting to get there. They’re a team that’s capable of winning a lot of games this year.”
As for the play of Danny Boyer and his three goals, “Danny feeds off of other players, that’s just his game. That’s just the way we play. If somebody’s gonna put so much attention on him, that means some other people aren’t getting an extra step or something. Sooner or later you gotta leave some people to stop some of our other guys, and when you do there’s not a better guy in the game that you want catching the ball 2 or 3 yards in front of the cage. He’s a little chubby,” joked Berkman. “He’s not fast, but he’s got the quickest hands and he’s one of the most unbelievable finishers that I’ve ever coached. And he only needs about an inch to get his hands free. That happened, they were forced to come a little bit quicker a couple of times because we started to break them down defensively. Dasinger broke em down, Luiz broke em down, now they were starting to second guess a little bit about not going and then they started going and that opened it up for Danny and he got a couple great looks,” said Berkman.
On the defense: Our D played good the whole game. [Chase] Stewart didn’t have a goal or a point [he had 9 shots – and did get top-side a few times]. He got some shots, but they weren’t clean. Heier did a good job. I thought our D played really good. We made a couple mental mistakes where we got caught up-field and they got an easy goal. One time Luis thought he was further away from the goal and the kid was only 10 yards and he wasn’t even guarding him. I thought overall our D played great.”
On the play of goalie Max Zarchin and his 11 saves, “Well, Max has had some hot and cold games. This is good for his confidence to play big in a big game. He was seeing the ball real well today. He did a nice job clearing the ball too. Max had some huge saves. On the road against a great team you gotta get double digit saves.”
Looking ahead, Salisbury has a few big games on the horizon, namely a showdown with Lynchburg, who some may remember as the last team to beat Salisbury way back on April 10th, 2003. Salisbury is again silencing the critics and as teams like Middlebury, Cortland and Naz lose, they do what they do best…win.
“Obviously we gotta take care of Mary Washington on Wednesday first in the conference down there. But Lynchburg, there’s a good chance, they got Virginia Wesleyan and then they got Hampden-Sydney, who’s a really good team I think, next Saturday. Lynchburg’s a great offensive team, they have a lot of great players on offense. We had a battle down there last year. I think it was 14-7 or 14-8, but it was only a two goal game going into the fourth quarter. Ya know, I don’t understand, you lax guys rate all this stuff and everything, everybody gives us a bad rap about our schedule. You look at the top 5 this week, who else can we play? Roanoke, Lynchburg, Washington College, Gettysburg. To me, I’m not a math major, but if there’s five teams behind you and they’re the top five, who else can I play and not have a good schedule? A lot of people say we don’t anybody, I mean who else can we play. After playing 7 conference games, we play the next guys in the top five, and Ohio Wesleyan’s always been there, ya know I don’t know what else we can do. But we’ll play anybody, we’ve always been like that.”
| Scoring | |
|---|---|
| Brian Pryor | (2, 1) |
| Jared Harriman | (3, 0) |
| Chris Renzi | (1, 0) |
| Evan Gallant | (1, 0) |
| Saves | |
|---|---|
| Pat Vaughan | 6 (0.316) |
| Current Record | |
|---|---|
| Gettysburg | 7-1 |
