Red Raiders down by 1 goal with 9 minutes to go before Quakers pull away
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
OCEAN CITY – The last time the Red Raider girls lacrosse team faced Moorestown, it was in the South Jersey Group III sectional in May 2019. Ocean City lost, 17-3.
In 2018, Ocean City fell to the Quakers 18-3 in the regular season and again in the finals of the Group III sectional, 18-3.
This season, Moorestown is ranked No. 2 in the state as Ocean City rebuilds with a team of only two returning starters and a varsity squad packed with freshmen.
On Saturday, the Red Raiders hosted the Quakers at the Tennessee Avenue field in a non-conference game. The final score was 13-7, a narrower margin, but what was more impressive is that with just over nine minutes left in the game, Ocean City was trailing by a single goal, 8-7.
The Red Raiders played even up with Moorestown for most of the game before the Quakers finally pulled away.
“I think when you are preparing to play an opponent that on paper is supposed to win the game it fires you up because no one outside this team has the expectation for you to win the game,” coach Lesley Graham said. “That’s something we really tried to focus on this week in the couple of days of practice that we had. We have the attitude of a champion but the hustle of an underdog – young team, new coach, didn’t play last year. We’re kind of that sleeper team that maybe people didn’t expect to take Moorestown to a 7 to 13 game.”
Moorestown led most of the game, but not by much until the end, only getting ahead by one or two goals before Ocean City would come back to tie it up.
The score was 5-5 early in the second half and 7-8 with 9:15 left on the clock in the game.
“In a 50-minute lacrosse game, I think we played really hard for 40 of those minutes,” Graham said. “I think for 10 minutes we had a little momentum shift and we let down a little bit. Moorestown was able to take advantage of that. We got a yellow card, they scored a couple of goals while were a man down. The draws started trending in their direction and we played defense for a majority of that game. At some point, you naturally let your guard down and Moorestown saw that and took advantage.
“That’s what makes them the No. 2 team in the state,” she added.
Graham cited the outstanding play of the team’s goalie, Reagan Liepe, “She was lights out in the cage, the energy, the effort. Her talk was hands down the best I’ve seen this season so far.”
She also said the freshmen on the team “stepped up big time. This is the biggest game they’ve played in yet and it’s only our second game, but they really rose to the occasion and you wouldn’t have been able to tell they were only freshmen out there. Gracie Pierce, Kelsea Cooke and Delainey Sutley did a really good job for us.
“And I think overall the entire team bought into what we’re trying to do and our defense as a unit held them to the kinds of shots we wanted them to take,” she said.
Senior Alex Smallwood scored 3 goals for the Red Raiders and teammates Sutley and Racheli Levy-Smith score 2 each. Sutley and Cooke also had an assist each.
For Moorestown, Katie Buck proved hard to stop, especially late in the game. She scored 6 goals and had 8 draw controls. Also scoring for the Quakers were Emma Dengler and Caroline Button, 2 each; and Dylan Silar, Emma Greer and Grace Lynch, 1 each.