UMass Boston Men’s Lacrosse opened up the season with a trying four game stretch on the road and came away with three wins to kick off a run at the 2007 league title. Sporting a 3-1 overall record, 1-0 in the conference, the Beacons are strong as a team defensively and are developing a fearsome foursome of senior attacker Christopher Hanafin, senior attacker Robert Thayer, sophomore midfielder Bobby Cusack and sophomore attacker Peter Kovach to lead the way in the scoring department. Despite a fast start and high expectations, living up to the standards of a long time winning lax program is never easy.
The season opener at Emerson College on March 26 turned out to be an epic mismatch. The Beacons shut out their cross-town rivals, and scored a season high 17 goals on 45 shots, with seven different beacons scoring at least once and four players scoring at least a hat trick. Senior goaltender Nicholas Eaton was only forced to make 6 saves but deserves credit no less, for notching his first shutout of 2007.
For the March 29 match, the Beacons traveled to Curry College to pick up a slim 8-7 victory in double overtime. Hanafin notched his second hat trick of the season, and also had 4 goals at Emerson, to lead his UMass Boston squad past Curry in dramatic fashion. After a quiet first period, the Beacons raced to a 4-2 lead in the second before Curry scored twice to close out the scoring in regulation tied at 4. In the first overtime period aggressive play yielded no scoring until the final 3 minutes when Curry went up 5-4 and UMass Boston followed quickly with the equalizer from Hanafin, to extend the contest yet again. Finally in the second extra session UMass pulled away by two goals, only to have the lead cut in half with 42 seconds left, but the last ditch effort from the Curry crew was not enough to stop the Beacons from notching their second win of the season.
March 31 took the UMass club to Memorial Drive to face MIT. The Beacons had an off day, dropping the match by a score of 11-4, and losing their first game of the season. The Beacons were outscored in every period, which set the tone for a disappointing afternoon.
Bouncing back quickly, UMass Boston closed out the road stretch with a trip to our rival UMass campus in Dartmouth where they picked up another slim but satisfying 8-7 win, this time no extra time was needed. Dartmouth was the Beacons’ first conference opponent, and the squad is unbeaten in conference play for now, a record that will be difficult to maintain through a relentless LEC schedule.
UMass Boston is in the middle of a four-game home stand, and plays next on April 10 at 3 p.m., when they host the Massachusetts Maritime Academy at Clark Field. The next conference game will be against the University of Southern Maine on April 12, also at 3 p.m.