Boys 4-1 despite losing
34 players over 3 weeks
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
OCEAN CITY – The Ocean City boys lacrosse team dropped its first game of the season Saturday, falling to visiting Haddonfield 5-4 in a close game at Carey Stadium, but what is most surprising is that the team racked up four wins before that with a lineup decimated by COVID-19 pandemic protocols.
Going into Saturday’s game, coach Joe LaTorre’s team beat Lower Cape May Regional, Oakcrest, Moorestown and Cherokee, and did so with a rotating cast of characters.
When asked about choosing his lineup for games, the coach’s frustration was obvious.
“Honestly, it’s whoever is available,” LaTorre said.
“It’s probably been the most disheartening season from a group standpoint,” he said. “The kids are great, this is one of the greatest groups I’ve ever had, but I come to work every day and I have in the back of my head, ‘Who’s going to be missing because of contact tracing?’
“Recently it’s kind of gotten out of hand. We’ve lost 34 guys in a matter of three weeks. Any other team would have to shut down at that point, losing that many guys, but we keep plugging and playing. It’s the next guy up.”
LaTorre did not blame the loss to Haddonfield on contact tracing – the protocol in which students are put on quarantine because they were in proximity of a student who had tested positive for the coronavirus.
The coach put the blame squarely on his team getting too many penalties early and missing opportunities.
“Today we had three starters missing, but that’s not the reason we lost. We lost because we didn’t take advantage of any opportunity we had,” he said.
He said he told his players after the game that Haddonfield was the better team Saturday and “We didn’t deserve to win today. We made more mistakes than them and we didn’t take advantage of our opportunities. They took advantage of one more opportunity than us and they deserved today’s win.”
Part of the problem, he added, was having five minutes of penalties in the first quarter.
“You can’t play a 12-minute quarter a man down for five minutes. You just can’t and you can’t expect to be winning.” Fixing that problem, he said, will come with “discipline and playing the right way.”
The Red Raiders were down 3-0 to start the game, but they battled to tie the game with goals by Jake Schneider, Dylan Dwyer and freshman Pat Grimley.
It looked like they were going to go into halftime up 4-3 after Schneider scored a goal on a restart with about two seconds remaining, but after conferring for a few minutes, the referees waved off that goal, deciding possession belonged to Haddonfield (6-0).
Although the Red Raiders had opportunities in the second half – and Grimley scored a second goal – Haddonfield put two in the back of the net and defensively held off Ocean City’s attacks to win, 5-4.
Still, dealing with so many of his players out on quarantine hasn’t been easy.
“Honestly this season has probably been the most challenging,” LaTorre said. “We have yet to play a single game this year with our entire (starting) lineup. Every game we have guys missing. Fortunately we have the numbers this year so it’s the next man up and they’re stepping up and playing and filling that position and that void.
“The big thing I’m realizing is it’s so hard to get the kids to be focused because every practice when they see a new guy missing, it’s hard for them to be ready to go because they’re thinking, ‘Oh, that poor guy, he’s gotta sit out now for two weeks.’ We have so many guys on quarantine right now it’s kind of getting out of hand,” LaTorre said, pointing out it’s not for them testing positive for COVID-19, but for being considered a close contact.
The coach said he has relied on strong senior leaders and on a freshman – Grimley – as part of the team’s success so far.
“Jake Schneider has done a great job stepping up from an offensive standpoint and Jake Inserra is standing up for the defense,” he said. “The senior leadership has been pretty good this year. They’re on the guys. In some years past we had some guys who weren’t working and putting in the time and they didn’t have the seniors pushing them, but this year it’s the opposite. We have seniors getting on guys who aren’t putting in the work. It definitely helps you from a coaching standpoint.”
He also called Grimley “an elite talent. He’s 100 percent the best or one of the best freshmen in the entire state of New Jersey. To step into our offense and do what he’s doing, that’s remarkable for someone that’s 14 years old.”
He noted that the Red Raiders aren’t relying on a single player for their goal-scoring. “We’re a team offense and do a great job of moving the ball in spurts and trying to look for the open man,” he said.
LaTorre expected his players to bounce back quickly from the team’s loss Saturday because it was facing another tough opponent on Monday. He gives the team 24 hours to celebrate wins and think about losses, then he expects them to move on to the next game.
“Monday’s not going to get any easier. We’re going up to north Jersey to play Ridge, which is a top 20 team, and a previous state champion of their group,” he said. “Every week we have quality games. We have Ridge next week, Rumson-Fair Haven, which is No. 5 in the state, the following week, St. Augustine Prep the following week.
“They have to learn real quick what it takes to compete at that level because the big thing is, we want to learn from these mistakes now. We don’t want to learn from these mistakes when the playoffs are here because then we have to wait a year to use what we learned.”
The season so far
The Red Raiders opened their season with overpowering wins over Lower Cape May Regional (17-1) and Oakcrest (17-3), then had two solid wins over out-of-conference teams Moorestown and Cherokee.
Against Moorestown, Ocean City won 8-4, powered by three goals by Schneider, two each by Nick Volpe and Brady Rauner and one from Grimley. Schneider also had two assists.
The Red Raiders beat Cherokee 12-9, overcoming a huge first-quarter deficit.
Cherokee got up 5-0 over the Red Raiders, but Ocean City narrowed the gap in the second quarter with three goals of its own, then had a huge third quarter, outscoring Cherokee 7-3.
Grimley had a big game with two goals and two assists and Rauner scored three goals. Schneider, Volpe and Jack Davis each had two goals and Chris Calabro added another.
Dwyer also won 10 face-offs in the game.
The scoring was spread around against LCMR with three goals each by Schneider, Grimley and Rauner, two each by Dwyer and Volpe, and single goals by Davis, Ori Levy-Smith, Vinnie Gullo and JP Patella. Against Oakcrest, Grimley had five goals and three assists, Schneider had two goals and four assists and Volpe and Dwyer each had three goals. Gullo had two goals and Calabro had one.
