Hoosac Valley Girls Top Wahconah on Senior Day

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires.com Sports
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CHESHIRE, Mass. -- Hoosac Valley senior goalie Abi Disbrow pitched a shutout in the first half and allowed just two goals while making seven saves in Tuesday’s win over Wahconah.
 
You might say she was seeing the ball really well.
 
And after you talk to her, you might wonder how.
 
“I lost my glasses the other night,” Disbrow said with a laugh after a 7-2 victory for Hoosac Valley’s fifth-straight win. “I guess this was just a blessing.
 
“The ball’s yellow, though, so I can follow it pretty well.”
 
She followed it well enough to stop a couple of free position shots in the first half as Hoosac Valley built a 4-0 lead.
 
“She’s nuts,” Hurricanes coach Molly Meczywor said of Disbrow’s equipment issue. “She doesn’t like to tell me these things. She likes to surprise me afterward.
 
“But today was a special day.”
 
It was special for all seven seniors and the Hoosac squad as a whole as it completed a season sweep of one of its most accomplished Berkshire County rivals.
 
Last year, the Hurricanes took a big step forward in earning the program’s first sectional tournament berth. This year, they are 12-2 with two games left and can set their sights on earning the program’s first home game in the tourney.
 
They already clicked off one box on their to-do list: earning Hoosac’s first win over Wahconah last week in Dalton.
 
Meczywor’s team came up a little short against the other traditional county power, but its 10-9 loss at Mount Greylock a couple of weeks ago, coupled with the wins against Wahconah, show that the Hurricanes are for real.
 
“My first year, we wouldn’t have even thought about doing this,” Disbrow said. “We didn’t make the tournament or anything like that. It’s crazy what we’ve done.
 
“We put so much hard work in every day. To get into the tournament as fast as we did this year and to almost beat Greylock? We couldn’t have even thought about that.”
 
Claudia Bresett got the scoring going on Tuesday with a goal in the 12th minute. Alie Mendel followed less than a minute later with the first of her three goals.
 
Mendel scored on a bounce shot in the 18th minute, and Faith Hall scored on a lucky bounce when she sent the ball into the fan from well out on the left wing with 5 minutes, 28 seconds left in the first half.
 
Brooke DiGennaro pushed the lead to 5-0 with a goal early in the second half before Jillian Cote got Wahconah on the board by winning the ensuing faceoff and sprinting in to make it 5-1 eight seconds later.
 
Hannah Bowlby scored off a pass from Suzie Stefanik to get the visitors within three goals midway through the half.
 
But Bresett and Mendel scored the game’s last two goals, the final tally coming with just more than a minute left to put the game completely out of reach.
 
Wahconah (8-8) will look to stop a three-game losing streak on Thursday when it hosts Springfield Central.
 
Hoosac Valley hosts Central on Wednesday.
 
Even though it still has that rescheduled home game on the schedule, Hoosac Valley kept its Senior Day on Tuesday. And the Class of 2018 were very much on Meczywor’s mind when it was over.
 
“You think about the lumps we’ve taken,” Meczywor said. “Going 1-14 and 4 and whatever. Every year, we’ve set goals, and we continue to just do one goal at a time.
 
“This senior class is really special. They’ve taken the lumps. I think I’m happiest for them. They’ve built the building blocks. When you think about Bri Lancia and Skylar Case and Angelica [Tanguay], they were the ones getting pounded. We’d lose to Greylock 20-2 and 18-4.
 
“To see them feel the pride is what coaching is all about because they’ve worked really hard to get to where we are. We still have a long way to go, but we’re happy with where we are.”
 
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