Stanford Can Bolster National Standing in Maryland
by Patrick Stevens | Special to Lacrosse Magazine Online
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| Lauren Schmidt is one of several contributors for Stanford who have limited opponents' ability to single out any one of them. No. 8 Stanford looks to upend No. 2 Maryland in College Park on Thursday. Follow live here. |
Live Blog: No. 8 Stanford at No. 2 Maryland
As a two-week break for exams wound to an end, Stanford women’s lacrosse coach Amy Bokker and her staff noticed a trend in the national rankings.
“We were kind of chuckling to ourselves,” Bokker said. “We’re going up without actually playing.”
Sure enough, the Cardinal rose to No. 8 this week, the highest ever for the program.
The opportunity to soar even further, though, will require actually taking the field against a pair of top-10 teams on the East Coast.
The Cardinal (5-2), which came off a 15-day layover Monday with a 19-4 rout of Cincinnati, soon flew east for a significant stretch. It won’t determine the season for Stanford -- the winner of the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation, of which the Cardinal is a member, is assured a spot in an NCAA tournament play-in game.
But visiting No. 2 Maryland on Thursday and No. 10 Towson on Sunday provides a chance to propel the Cardinal ever closer to the at-large discussion.
“We’re not satisfied at No. 8,” Bokker said. “We want to make that push to be one of the top teams. That’s what teams at Stanford are about.”
Everything about this season would suggest Bokker’s bunch
is as well.
After splitting an upstate New York trip with Le Moyne and
Syracuse, the Cardinal came home to face defending national champ
Northwestern. The Wildcats built a 10-6 lead early in the second
half, but Stanford scored four times in less than two minutes to
tie it.
Northwestern gradually wore down the Cardinal, emerging with an
18-11 victory. But two days later, Stanford fended off then-No. 19
Ohio State in overtime to begin what has grown into a four-game
winning streak.
“We just ran out of gas [against Northwestern] and we had to
play a great team in Ohio State that Sunday,” Bokker said.
“We came off that level of emotion and competed and beat Ohio
State in overtime, and it was huge for us.”
While the Cardinal’s profile grows, there aren’t many
well-known names on the roster. Four players -- Sarah Flynn, Leslie
Foard, Dana Lindsay and Lauren Schmidt -- have already reached
double figures in scoring, but none has more than 16 goals through
seven games. Senior attacker Claire Hubbard enters the trip east
with 15 assists.
Nine regulars are averaging at least a point a game, ensuring
Stanford is not the easiest team to prepare for.
“If you look at stats for other teams, you can find who you
want to focus on,” Bokker said. “I think that’s
difficult to do with us, because we’re so balanced and
distribute to one another. That’s been a
real bonus.”
Still, there’s plenty of work ahead, and it starts with a
road trip that’s actually a bit like a homecoming. A dozen of
Stanford’s players are from Maryland, Virginia or Washington,
D.C. Bokker spent 11 seasons as the coach at George Mason.
“It’s great to be in a place I’m familiar
with,” Bokker said. “It’s easier finding a place
to eat, knowing directions, that kind of thing. For a lot of our
players, they feel that sense of home when they’re here.
Sometimes when we’re on the road, we get more fans than our
opponents because we have so many family and friends and alumni
coming out to support us.”
With a top-10 team and a long break in the schedule finally over,
that’ll be easier than ever this week in the
Baltimore-Washington corridor.
MPSF Notes
Denver midfielder Ali Flury and Stanford’s Leslie Foard were added to the Tewaaraton Award watch list this week. They join Stanford’s Schmidt as MPSF respresentatives on the list... UC Davis, the only team in the MPSF with two conference victories already, started a stretch of six straight games away from home this week. The Aggies blasted Liberty 21-0 in a neutral site game Monday before falling at unbeaten Lehigh 11-9 the next day … Oregon midfielder Jana Drummond was named the MPSF Player of the Week after scoring four goals and adding seven ground balls and five caused turnovers in a defeat of Cincinnati on Saturday.
