Duke entered this season boasting a top-10 recruiting class and five preseason All-Americans.
But nearly midway through March, the Blue Devils have yet to earn their first conference victory.
No. 15 Duke dropped its third straight contest with an 11-8 loss to Louisville Saturday at the UofL Lacrosse Stadium, extending its losing streak to three weeks. Despite a pair of hat tricks from junior Maddie Crutchfield and senior Kyra Harney, the Blue Devils could not close the gap after the Cardinals' red-hot start and fell in their first true road game of the season.
“We have to find a way right now to just dig ourselves out of this rut and start performing up to our ability,” Duke head coach Kerstin Kimel told GoDuke.com. “We just need to focus on us and try to get our game in a better place so that we’re better prepared to put ourselves in a position to perform better.”
Although the Blue Devils (4-3, 0-3 in the ACC) managed to force Louisville into a shot clock violation on its first possession of the day, the Cardinals tallied the first two scores of the contest. Duke then capitalized on a pair of free-position shots—first from Harney and later from Crutchfield—to knot the score in the 22nd minute.
Louisville would not stay quiet for long. Just 10 seconds after Crutchfield’s goal, freshman Meghan Siverson—who finished the day with four goals—ripped one past Blue Devil netminder Jamie Lockwood to give the Cardinals some breathing room. The Cardinals notched two more goals and limited the visitors to just one free-position goal in the remainder of the opening half, heading to the locker room with a 5-3 advantage.
Louisville (7-2, 1-1) pulled away from there, opening the second half with three straight goals before Duke could find its footing.
Once again, Harney and Crutchfield tallied back-to-back goals to cut the Cardinal lead to three with 16:32 remaining, but Louisville found the back of the net three more times as the Blue Devils scored just once more in the next 12 minutes.
“Our defense played pretty tough,” Kimel said. “Jamie [Lockwood] played pretty well. We made some defensive mistakes and Louisville took advantage of some of our lapses.”
Duke found some momentum with the clock winding down, but the charge came too late. Harney broke through to complete her third hat trick of the season with just more than two minutes remaining. Sophomore Ellie Majure followed it up with her first goal of the contest with less than a minute remaining.
One bright spot in an otherwise bleak performance came in the draw circle, where sophomore Olivia Jenner led the Blue Devils to a 16-5 mark by collecting 10 of her own draw controls.
And even though Duke generated many opportunities that way and managed to stay with the Cardinals in 50-50 balls with 13 ground balls apiece, the Blue Devils struggled with the same stick-handling issues that have plagued them from the season’s start. Duke committed 18 turnovers to Louisville’s 10, marking its seventh straight game with double-digit turnovers.
“We’re still plagued with turnovers and the majority of them are on our offensive end,” Kimel said. “We’re still looking for solutions to how we can do that better, because its impacting our ability to execute what we want to execute.”
The Blue Devils will have a chance to right the ship when they travel to Philadelphia to take on Saint Joseph’s Thursday and Pennsylvania on Saturday. But in the midst of a five-game road swing and with its next ACC contest two weeks away, Duke must prevent itself from falling in too deep a hole to recover.
The Blue Devils have just four conference matchups remaining, including games against No. 2 North Carolina and No. 6 Syracuse.
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