MARBLEHEAD — It may have taken over 62 minutes of game time, but Hadley Carlton did what she’s done all season for the Marblehead field hockey team. Carlton scored a huge goal in overtime to lift the No. 5 Magicians over No. 12 Tewksbury, 1-0, in the first round of the Division 2 North tournament at Piper Field on Wednesday afternoon.
Carlton’s came off an assist from Holly Rowe with 12:20 left to go in the sudden-death overtime period.
“I thought we played really well all-around tonight,” said Marblehead coach Linda Rice Collins. “There were some things we could have done better, like finish some of those balls in front of the net that we had, but it was a great team win for us.”
One of the keys to the win was Marblehead’s strong defense, which was on display early in the game. While the Magicians possessed the ball for a good majority of the first half and got a couple of decent scoring chances, it was Tewksbury who had the best scoring opportunities in the first half. Tewksbury earned two corners back-to-back with five minutes left in the first half, but couldn’t get anything past goalkeeper Isabel Levin, who made big saves on both corners.
“Everytime Isabel needed to step up tonight, she did,” Rice Collins said. “And I thought the defense played an unbelievable game tonight.”
The Magicians earned a corner of their own with just under two minutes left in the first half, but couldn’t get a goal.
The second half played much like the first, with the two teams trading corners back and forth. Tewksbury took a timeout with just over 11 minutes remaining to try and regroup in hopes of sparking some offense, but the Redmen just couldn’t get anything past Levin.
When the final buzzer sounded and the score remained tied at 0-0, the game moved from an 11-on-11 matchup to a 7-on-7 sudden-death overtime period. Less than three minutes into the overtime, Rowe sent a ball into the middle onto the stick of Carlton, who fired a shot from about 10 yards out that found its way into the back of the net for the win.
Overtime’s nothing new to Marblehead, which seems to find itself in these tight tournament games every year. So much so, in fact, that the team has been working on 7-on-7 drills for some time now.
“We always seem to find ourselves in these kinds of games, so we’ve got some experience in this department,” Rice Collins said. “We’ve actually been working almost entirely on 7-on-7 drills for the past three days because our history tells that we’d likely be in a game like this, and it paid off.”
Senior leadership also helped the Magicians’ cause, as there are 17 seniors on this year’s Marblehead squad.
“Their experience certainly is a positive factor,” said Rice Collins. “But I think more than that is the fact that they’ve just played together for so long and they really know how to work together.”
The path to a Division 2 North title and beyond doesn’t get any easier from here, as the Magicians take on No. 4 Triton on the road Friday at 2:30.
