Girls’ Lax Falls in Heart Breaker Against Choate Rosemary Hall

Exeter girls’ lacrosse suffered a heartbreaking one goal loss to Choate Rosemary Hall on Saturday to open the season. After being up 10-4 with only 10 minutes to go in the game, the team let Choate claw back into the game little by little. Due to some defensive lapses and lack of communication, Exeter lost their lead to end regular playing time at 10-10, sending the game into overtime, where Big Red fell 11-10. The team starts the regular season with a loss: their third in a row over the years to Choate.The team had a dominant first half, with many goal scoring opportunities and very few turnovers. “Our movement of the ball up the field and communication was really good, and also, we were outworking the other team,” upper Elsa Chinburg said.At halftime, the team decided to try to keep possession more than looking to shoot, only shooting on great opportunities. This, however, led to a lack of aggression and the team getting away from the things that the team was doing well in the first half. “We got into the mindset where we thought we had the game, when there was still so much time left,” lower Noa Siegel said. “About five minutes into the second half, we started losing every draw and lost momentum and let the other team begin to walk all over us.”Letting up the lead in this game taught Big Red of the importance of starting and finishing games. “I think that after two or three goals, Choate regained their confidence and had momentum building that helped them take us to overtime and eventually beat us,” senior captain Leo Liautaud said. “I do think that we should have had a timeout earlier in the second half after we got scored on a couple times to get together and remind ourselves of how hard we worked to get the score in our favor and that we needed to work just as hard to maintain the win until the end of the fifty minutes.”The team is extremely disappointed with the loss. However, they are making sure to use this as motivation to work harder in upcoming practices, especially to build the stamina to finish games as strong as they start them. “All we can do now is channel our negative feelings into pushing ourselves even harder during our practices and maintaining a high intensity, focused workout with the short time we have out on the turf each day. Also, we need to learn to work hard in a game from the first to the very last minute on the clock, no matter what the score is,” Liautaud said.The team hopes to grab a win in their home game against Thayer this Saturday at noon. Exeter has not had a win against Thayer since they began playing each other in 2010, but due to the motivation from the Choate game, the team looks more primed than ever to get the win on Saturday.