Felix, Hurricanes Start Tough Week with Win at Lee
LEE, Mass. – The Hoosac Valley girls lacrosse team Monday was down a key offensive contributor as the Hurricanes faced one of their biggest tests of the year to date.
The three big guns remaining stepped up in a big way.
Jacinta Felix scored eight goals to lead Hoosac Valley to a 17-8 win over previously unbeaten Lee.
Emma Meczywor scored six times and assisted on five goals, and Ashlyn Lesure rounded out the scoring with a hat trick and five assists as the Hurricanes won their fourth straight to improve to 6-1 this spring.
“The threesome of Jacinta, Ashlyn and Emma, there’s a nice crossover from AAU basketball,” Hoosac Valley coach Molly West said. “You can see them working and they almost have a sense, the three of them.
“They spend a lot of time together outside of sports, too. But I thought they did a really good job of finding each other. … We focused on an off-ball cutter from the opposite side down. It worked for us today. I thought Jacinta saw the ball really well. And Ashlyn and Emma see the field in terms of assists.”
Felix scored four of the Hurricanes’ first five goals and four of the game’s first six goals. She converted a free position just more than seven minutes into the game to give the visitors a 5-1 lead.
Meczywor then scored a pair of goals, the second in transition to make it a 7-1 game in the 12th minute
Lee’s Naima Clark then snapped a four-goal Hoosac Valley run with a goal, and Netti Boyko scored on a free position moments later to cut the margin to five goals at 8-3.
In fact, after the Hurricanes jumped out to that 7-1 lead midway through the first half, the Wildcats (5-1) played nearly even with the visitors.
Lee just could not find its way out of the early hole.
Like Hoosac Valley, which was missing Lauren Davis (19 goals, 13 assists), Lee was missing a couple of its starters and, to make things tougher, coming off a long period of inactivity for some of its players.
“I think our girls were connecting well,” Lee coach Sarah Schaeffer said. “A lot of them haven’t played with each other in a week. I think it took us a while to get used to that.”
Clark finished with a hat trick to lead Lee’s offense, which got a pair of goals from Boyko and a goal apiece from Phoenix Lucido, Kelly Nicotra and Tessa Baldwin.
Boyko and Baldwin each scored in the closing minutes of the first half to get Lee within five goals again at 11-6.
But the Hurricanes got off to another fast start after half-time with two goals from Felix, and Lee never got closer than six goals the rest of the way.
Hoosac Valley allowed just two goals in the second half with Kennedy Whitely making three of her seven saves after the break.
“I thought this was our first game our defensive unit really came together as a unit,” West said. “They were talking to each other, they were supporting each other. They started to coach each other, which was kind of cool. A couple of times, you could hear, ‘Hey, you’ve got to drop,’ ‘I’ve got the adjacent,’ ‘Who do you have? Come back.’
“I think that was huge. Tia Kareh is our defensive captain and just does a great job of that.”
Monday’s win gave Hoosac Valley a 4-1 record in the Pioneer League heading into a pair of conference games to finish the week: Tuesday at home against Chicopee and Friday at Amherst-Pelham, which handed the Hurricanes their only loss of the season on April 7 in Cheshire.
“This was a huge win for us, in terms of our schedule,” West said. “At the beginning of every season, our team creates values, and that’s what we use throughout the season to guide us. Every week, we focus on a different theme. And this week’s theme was perseverance and grit, purposely chosen because the start and end of our week, we knew, was going to be kind of tough.”
Lee will look to get back in the win column on Tuesday when it hosts Springfield Central.