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Lady Skippers split games against Duxbury and Fairhaven

Date last updated 2:11 pm Apr 29th, 2008

A very rough end to the week for the Cohasset girls lacrosse team.

On Thursday, the team traveled to Duxbury to play the defending Division 2 state champions. After tying the game at 1 on a Kaci Kucinski free-position shot, Duxbury ran off the next 10 goals. Caitlin Mahoney scored two of the next three goals in the game -- both on free-position shots -- but 12-3 was as close as Cohasset ever got, as Duxbury ran off to a 22-3 win.

Amanda Masotta played a particularly strong game in the net, which might be a surprise given how many goals she surrendered, but she saw more rubber than a tourist in a tire factory and thigns would have been much worse had she not come up with several point-blank saves.

Most times, you would come away from a game that was lost by 19 and you'd feel bad about the performance, but Cohasset came through this game with its head up, having worked hard to see a lot of kids play at that level, trying a lot of new and different things and being willing to pay for mistakes in order to come away from the game smarter. The effort level was outstanding throughout, despite the score; Duxbury made Cohasset pay for virtually every mistake that was made, and ultimately that was really the difference, but the Cohasset girls came away from the day knowing that they will only meet Duxbury again if they wind up in the state tournament, and the team clearly would relish the chance for redemption.

The next day, however, Cohasset played a brand new Fairhaven team and looked like a squad for whom the playoffs are a longshot. After rushing out to a three-goal lead, Cohasset gave up an end-to-end run that made the score 3-1. The same kind of defensive lapse happened again to make the score 5-2, and two more poor defensive plays made the score 6-4. That was particularly alarming because the same Fairhaven squad had been badly outmatched against Cohasset's junior varsity team in a scrimmage in late March.

The home team bounced back to make the score 11-5 at the half, and after trading goals in the first minute of the second stanza, broke free four four goals to salt the game away. From there, the two teams traded goals to a 19-10 final.

Kelsey Erler, Kayla Farren, Lindsay Hill and Amy Meikleham each scored three goals in the game, with Hill adding two assists and Erler one. Caitlin Mahoney scored two more goals -- giving her the team lead with seven scores through four games -- and Hannah Burgess added a goal and an assist. Isabelle Franklin, Kaci Kucinski, Chelsea Silvia and Olivia Murphy added solo markers; for Silvia, a sophomore, it was her first varsity goal, as she finished a feed from Kaleigh Teague.

Amanda Masotta made six saves on a day where she got very little help from the defense.

Coach Chuck Jaffe had this to say about the Duxbury and Fairhaven games and the next few games on the slate. “I have never felt so good about an ugly loss as I did in Duxbury, and I have never been so disappointed with a wide-margin win as with these two games. This team needs to find its identity, which is hard when you are playing feast-or-famine games where the opponents are either very weak or very strong. Regardless of the opponent, we need to come out and play at our top level, and we certainly haven't done that yet.

We've got a big test coming on Wednesday night against Norwell. They lost a close one to Duxbury earlier this year, they're a league game and they are the league champions, so they have a title that we aspire to. After that, it's a big game with Scituate ... big because it's a rivalry game, because both teams have tough schedules and could go a long way toward earning a playoff berth with a win. Moreover, it's the first game all year where, on paper, the game will be a close one; the first step in becoming a good team is beating the games you are supposed to win and the second step is in winning the close ones, so we would like to take a big step forward this week before we get to the school vacation week.”