LYNNFIELD — The Lynnfield girls lacrosse team battled back, but couldn’t overcome a slow start in a 15-11 home loss to Triton Thursday. The Pioneers fell behind 6-1 early before picking things up heading into the second quarter.
“I think we made some adjustments after the first quarter that the girls seemed to like,” Lynnfield coach Ethan Blanchette said. “That was good. We had some success when we had the ball, but we just didn’t have the ball enough.”
Between turnovers and some inconsistencies for the Pioneers, Triton dominated possession time. The most glaring issue for Blanchette was often during the start of play at the draw.
“This game went how a lot of games will go this season,” Blanchette said. “We grinded it out. We’re not going to be super sharp a lot of the time, but my one area I would like to see us improve on is the draws. I think we can improve on those. Triton won a lot more of the draws than we did and that’s an area that coming into the season I thought we could have some success in. That area was a little disappointing.”
Despite the loss, Erin Sharkey dominated defensively with six forced turnovers, three ground balls and two blocked shots.
“Erin started playing her sophomore year and hadn’t played for two years,” Blanchette said. “She played very well (Thursday). I think she was our player of the game.”
On the offensive side, Jen Flynn led the way with six goals. Maddie Mastrangelo and Molly Murphy each scored two goals, while Maddie Murphy had one.
Lynnfield started to gain a foothold in the second quarter with a pair of goals from Flynn and Molly Murphy, cutting the Triton lead to 6-5 before the half.
But Triton started the second half just as hot as the first and jumped out to a 10-5 lead in the third quarter.
Two more goals from Flynn and another from Mastrangelo cut the deficit to two. Triton followed with another run followed by Flynn’s fifth goal to put Lynnfield down 12-9 before the fourth.
Another Mastrangelo goal cut the lead to two again, but Triton ripped off three straight goals to take a commanding 15-10 lead in the final minutes.
Flynn’s sixth goal capped off the scoring for Lynnfield.
“We have a couple strong players and a lot of players where the pandemic year really set us back,” Blanchette said. “We don’t have a lot of players who play club so for most of the players on our team they hadn’t played for two years coming in. Most of them haven’t played varsity ever. We have 10 seniors which is great but we’re very inexperienced even with them.”
Lynnfield (0-2) has some time off before traveling to Hamilton-Wenham Tuesday (4).
