Stonehill women's lacrosse authors oddly compelling story
May 9, 2007
By Susan Bickelhaupt, Globe Staff
Mike Daly, coach of the Stonehill women's lacrosse team, told his players in a meeting at the beginning of the season he expected to win the national championship -- for the third time.
Daly was dead serious; the team was scared to death.
But so far the players are living up to his expectations.
"This is probably the proudest I've ever been of a team," said Daly, who has been coach since the program started in 1999. "We asked a lot of freshmen to do a lot of things, and that's hard to do. But they really stepped up."
With a 16-1 record, the Skyhawks won the Northeast-10 regular-season title. Last weekend, they beat Merrimack and Bentley to capture the NE-10 tournament, and now it's on to the NCAAs.
In the national semifinals, Stonehill is seeded second in the North Region and will play top-seeded C.W. Post (15-0) Saturday at 2 in Salem, Va. The South Region semifinal, pitting No. 1 West Chester (18-1) against No. 2 Lock Haven (16-3), is at 11:30 a.m.
To put in perspective just how young this Stonehill team is, consider that it lost four All-Americans to graduation, and 11 of the 18 players on the roster are freshmen or sophomores.
"I thought at the beginning that we had the potential, but I really had no idea what we would be," said Daly. "Even in preseason, because we're so young, we were really inconsistent.
"It's one of those things where it's not going to come together when you want it to -- it's just going to happen. And I think it happened in the Adelphi game, when we won in three overtimes. They were the defending national champs. That's when I really figured out what we had here."
That was April 14, at Garden City, N.Y., when Kristin Darrell scored with 16 seconds remaining in the third overtime for a 12-11 win. It was Stonehill's 11th straight victory to start the season -- part of a 15-game winning streak.
Daly thinks the team's history of winning NCAA titles in odd-numbered years (2003, 2005) may bode well.
"We're kind of an odd team, and it's an odd year, so we figure we're supposed to win," he said.
