LYNN — St. Mary’s senior goalie Adri Bowker was able to sit back, relax, and enjoy the show as she watched her team put up 11 goals against Northeast Metro at Manning Field Thursday evening, with the final tally showing 11-0.
To say the Spartans defense was smothering would be an understatement. The team allowed zero goals, and virtually didn’t let Northeast Metro touch the ball as Metro failed to advance the ball at any point past St. Mary’s 30-yard line. Many times, great defense leads to great offense, and that’s what happened for St. Mary’s.
Just two minutes into the contest, Senior Brianna Spinelli got the scoring started for the Spartans, tapping in a goal right after her team had intercepted a pass off of a Northeast Metro free hit. Senior Maggie Pierce was next with approximately 9:30 left in the first quarter. Pierce dragged the ball deep into Metro’s defensive zone on the left side before cutting in and crossing over to her backhand towards the middle of the net and dragged the ball to the other side as she put the ball away to make it 2-0. Pierce scored a hat trick in the game and was one of the driving forces of her team’s offensive flurry. Just 20 seconds after Pierce’s goal, the Spartans struck again to go up 3-0.
As if the team didn’t have an impressive enough first quarter, St. Mary’s matched their opening quarter goal total in the first three minutes of the second. Junior Gabbi Oakes had two goals on the night for her team. Oakes, also referred to by her teammates as “Goober,” talked about how the team couldn’t have gotten their offense going without the play from their back line.
“Our offense was really good, we couldn’t have done it without our defense controlling the ball and being able to transfer fields and bring it up the opposite sides,” said Oakes.
Northeast Metro was able to play better defensively against the Spartans after halftime. They were moments away from not allowing any third quarter goals until St. Mary’s scored for the Spartans with just 1:20 remaining.
What made St. Mary’s offense so effective Thursday night was the team’s stick work and ball handling, which is something that Head Coach Victoria Ault says the team practices every day.
“We work on our handles every single day in practice,” said Ault. “We work on passing, I was really happy with passing and the spacing in the field today and the way the girls communicated.”
Everything was going right for the Spartans and the same can be said about this season so far. The team picked up its sixth win on the season and has now outscored their opponents by a margin of 40 to 6. The Spartans, now 6-2-1, are using their strong start to carry them into the state championship where they feel that they can do some real damage.
“Yes, we’ve had some losses, some ties that have been hard, but we’re using that energy, that anger from those losses to keep developing,” said Oakes. “So we’d like to keep on this winning streak that we have and hopefully make it as far as we can in the states.”
Also contributing for the Spartans was freshman Abbie Poole who scored twice, Ava Korisianos, and 7th grader Vanessa Hall who added two goals.
St. Mary’s will try to keep their foot on the gas pedal against undefeated Masconomet in what will be a difficult test for the Spartans.
Ryan Vermette can be reached at [email protected]