Women's lacrosse coach Kerstin Kimel, a former standout player for Maryland, owes much of her coaching acumen to the Terps, but Friday evening, she and the Blue Devils showed little love to the nation's top-ranked team and perennial championship favorite.
The No. 2 Blue Devils (3-0, 1-0 in the ACC) overcame a three-goal deficit in the second half to beat the No. 1 Terrapins 9-8 in Koskinen Stadium, marking only the second victory over Maryland in Kimel's tenure and snapping a 43-game win streak for the defending NCAA champions. Less than 48 hours later, the Blue Devils started off slowly, but ended up routing Johns Hopkins 11-3, concluding a weekend that they will remember for years to come.
"We are down four starters, four people that we were pretty much counting on to start this year," Kimel said. "I think that, considering everything that we've been through, the fact that we're 3-0 at this point is pretty special."
Special would also be the way to describe the end of Friday's heated contest, as Lauren Gallagher, who has picked up Duke's scoring slack in the absence of the injured preseason national player of the year Kate Kaiser, beat Maryland goalie Alexis Venechanos on a free position shot to give Duke a 9-8 lead with 1:49 remaining in the contest.
Subsequently, Maryland advanced the ball downfield and had an opportunity to send the game into overtime,
The victory was especially sweet considering the margin that Duke faced with only less than 20 minutes remaining. The Blue Devils were down 7-4 with nearly half of the second period having elapsed, but stormed back with three goals in 10 minutes by Gallagher, Meg Barnet and senior Kelly Dirks to knot the game at 7-7. Maryland's Kelly Coppedge allowed the Terps to regain the lead at 8-7, but Bennett responded with her third goal of the game to once again force a tie with just under four minutes remaining.
That set up Gallagher heroics, although Kimel was quick to point out that despite the exciting victory, the mood was not entirely jubilant after the game.
"The win against Maryland was so bittersweet--we lost Amanda Hughes, she's gone for the season, so I don't know how much more we can take," Kimel said. "I'm more concerned with how we're going to respond to this week of practice. It really doesn't matter until May."
If Sunday's game against John Hopkins is any indication, the Blue Devils should be just fine. Duke never trailed to the Blue Jays and scored two goals in the final 16 seconds of the first half to turn a competitive contest into a blowout. Gallagher punched the ball through the cage from the right side to give the Blue Devils a 4-2 advantage and seconds later, freshman Katie Laschinger scored off a free-position shot as time expired.
Duke carried its momentum into the second half, firing five unanswered goals in the first 21 minutes of the half to impede any chance of a Johns Hopkins comeback.
The Blue Jays' Kristen Miller added a third goal for her team with 2:12 remaining, but Bennett put the final touch on Duke's runaway victory off a feed from Gallagher with 25 ticks left on the clock to give the Blue Devils their final margin of 11-3.
Kimel was pleased with her team's resiliency throughout the tough two-day stretch. Nonetheless, she did notice some things that she would like the Blue Devils to work on in the coming weeks.
"We've never played Johns Hopkins well, and it's always because we either play Maryland or Georgetown two days before, so I wanted our kids to be really, really sharp," Kimel said. "I think in the first half we played pretty well, we competed. I didn't think we were moving that well offensively. In the second half, we started to move better, but our decisions weren't as good."
Gallagher's diagnosis of Duke's play was decidedly more optimistic, though.
"We really didn't know what to expect when we entered the weekend, but all of our young kids really stepped up and just played their hearts out," she said. "We had a really good weekend, I felt, overall."
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